distributed filesystems

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Gergely CZUCZY wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 11:33:47AM +0200, Ivan Voras wrote:
>> Gergely CZUCZY wrote:
>>> Thanks for your reply. The most recent mail on distributed filesystems was 
>>> this: 
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-fs/2006-June/001902.html On 
>>> the recent archives I have only found ZFS-related stuff, some other 
>>> things, but absolutely nothing on distributed filesystems on fs@ From a 
>>> bit of googling, i've figured out that ZFS and AFS are my possible 
>>> choices, so far. Important to note, that i've only taken a very brief 
>>> lookaround in this topic yet.
5B>>
>> Googling http://www.google.com/search?q=zfs+distributed+file+system shows 
>> that zFS you mention is not the same ZFS the FreeBSD has :)
>>
>> As far as I can tell, Sun's ZFS can not act as a distributed file system 
>> (in concurrent updates scenario).
> sorry, it was a typo, I was a bit tired. probably because i've only seen 
> ZFS-related entries in the recent fs@ archives.
>
> I wanted to say CODA and AFS.
>
> since then i've seen that AFS's (openafs and arla) has only support for fbsd 
> 5.5, which is bit distressing since 7 is gettin seriously closed to it's 
> release.

Arla support is being actively worked out for 7; I hope very much that we will 
be able to merge the kernel module by the release so that the port can work 
out of the box, which would also address long-term maintenance issues that 
have caused Arla to lag significantly behind FreeBSD releases.  There's quite 
a bit more work to do, though.

In the list of distributed file systems posted so far, NFS (v2, v3) and CIFS 
(smbfs + Samba) have both been ignored.  FreeBSD also supports the Netware 
distributed file system (nwfs and Mars).  Netware support is currently without 
a maintainer, so it's not clear to me how well-tested it is in recent 
releases.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge