I'm not sure what the best approach is. Any other comments?
If I understand correctly, we have 2 options:
- add an API hook to get the distribution
- continue grabbing distribution information as an extended attribute,
but encode it on disk to make it portable
If we got the latter route, then we should probably encode all metadata
that we store in keyval pairs for completeness (dist, dfile array,
dirdata handle?, symlink target?, I can't remember what things are
stored this way currently).
-Phil
Murali Vilayannur wrote:
Hi Phil,
I have found some problems with pvfs2-viewdist, however, that I don't
have any patches for. The issue is that it is using extended attributes
to access the data that it needs. The problem with this approach is
that it is retrieving distribution and handle information by reading it
directly out of the server's collection, bypassing any network encoding.
Since the client doesn't really know how the server wrote this data,
it may not be able to interpret it correctly.
Yup. This is a problem indeed. Could we fix it the same way acl's are
stored by encoding them? But this will break existing storage spaces
although I suppose that is less of an issue especially now that we are
moving to newer storage formats..
For example, pvfs2-viewdist does not work for me when I use a 32bit
client to look at a file system hosted on 64bit servers. I suspect that
the problem would be more severe if the endian-ness where inverted.
yup.
There is an interface for getting the list of handles (properly
en/decoded) with PVFS_mgmt_get_dfile_array() that might work better for
that portion of the utility. I'm not sure about the distribution
information.
Hmm.. I was only looking at the system interfaces unfortunately. I didn't
realize that mgmt interfaces also exist :)
debugging, but we might want to think about how it should get the
information that it uses.
Agreed
Thanks,
Murali
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