Reply to post: Re: Well, I agree in theory but...

Sick of storage vendors? Me too. Let's build the darn stuff ourselves

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Well, I agree in theory but...

"Possibly we'd be better served with a user space NFS server, but they all seem to have their own problems."

As one of the miscreants partially responsible for the nfs-kernel-server clusterfuck, I agree with the first and second parts of that statement - and it's not helped by the userspace server not having had any substantial work since 1996.

The original userspace nfs server was - to be blunt - a piece of utterly slow shit. That's why nfs ended up in the kernel.

The other part about it being in kenrel space that you missed is that IT WILL NOT PLAY NICE with _anything_ else accessing the same disk blocks. If you NFS export a filesystem, then the _only_ access to it had better be via that NFS export or you risk trashing the data.

Putting nfs into the kernel more than 20 years ago was a solution to a problem (painfully slow exports and PCNFS being almost unusably slow) at a time when the people implementing it hadn't even thought of the possibility of something accessing XYZ file via NFS at the same time as something else doing it via SAMBA or something doing it at local level. If we had, then perhaps we'd have been more careful.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon