UFS2 with SAN

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Tomas Olsson wrote:

> "Rick C. Petty" <rick-arla at kiwi-computer.com> writes:
>> the Arla client seems to behave just fine on DragonFly, Mac OS X, and all 
>> other BSDs.  In FreeBSD, it's a wash.
>>
> DragonFly support is most likely fading away, AFAIK nobody's testing it. 
> arla-0.43 (and arla-0-44-branch) should work on FreeBSD 5, let us know if 
> there are any issues with that.
>
> As for arla post the blockcache rewrite, I now have OpenBSD going through 
> the basic tests (fails on heavier tests).  If there's anyone with good 
> knowledge of FreeBSD's vfs who's willing to help me out a bit I think we 
> could have 6.2 support done in a week or so.  If all is well, that is :)
>
> Last time I tried on 5.5 it kept crashing on me in the turnstile walk.
>
> I'm already funded and can work full time on this, but a FreeBSD hacker 
> would help a lot.  Any volunteers?

I'm not the right person to talk to you about FreeBSD VFS/buffering, but I'm 
very interested in seeing support for Arla improve for recent FreeBSD 
versions.  In particular, I think it would be very helpful it it worked on 
FreeBSD 7-CURRENT, which would facilitate merging nnpfs into CVS.  This might 
help solve the "forever playing catchup" problem that Arla seems constantly to 
experience with FreeBSD, in which nnpfs (previously xfs) gets left behind and 
works only on stale FreeBSD versions.  In any recent FreeBSD kernel, nnpfs 
will need to run as an MPSAFE file system, however.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge