Hi all: I'm still on PVFS 2.8.2 on my cluster, but enough things have been going wrong that I'm finally getting some traction toward upgrading. Furthermore, we're beginning work on an interoperability project that will make our pvfs2 storage available on another cluster. As I look into OrangeFS, I'm finding that I'm full of questions, and so far haven't found much useful documentation. There's the "high level features", the list of open projects, but I haven't found much with what currently works and how to build for various platforms.
For example, on my cluster, all packages must be rpms. I've got a spec file that I used to build both the pvfs2 userspace and a seperate one for the kernel modules, but for pvfs-2.8.2 (It was actually for several versions earlier that I bumped up a few times). At this point, I suspect I need a new .spec file, and I'm not very good at writing them. As I recall, there used to be a .spec file in the pvfs2 source tarball, but I couldn't find one this time. Is there a .spec file for building OrangeFS into rpm(s)? Second question: fuse support It seems that the vast majority of my difficulty has come with the kernel module. Furthermore, the cluster I'm trying to intertie with has stated that they will NOT load a kernel module on that cluster. My users of course have no clue about MPI-IO, and have no desire to rewrite portions of their code to make use of it; they do all their I/O via standard filesystem calls. So, is the kernel module still my best/only option, or is there a fuse or other module? Is the fuse module "faster/better" than the kernel module (by staying in userspace)? Of cousre, the other cluster owner would prefer that I just provide an NFS export for him to add to the automount table...Is that fessable? Presently my cluster headnode is a pvfs2-client, and it crashes/reboots frequently as a result of I/O intensive activities on it (eg, sftps, tarball creation/expansion on a pvfs2 volume, etc). So re-exporting my pvfs2 volume as NFS from this node seems like a bad idea (especially as it also hosts the user home directories for the cluster). Also, in general it seems that my pvfs2 performance has been pretty poor in general, especially from this node, and as such I'm quite concerned about that. Finally, anything special I should be aware of with OrangeFS upgrade and interoperability? --Jim _______________________________________________ Pvfs2-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.beowulf-underground.org/mailman/listinfo/pvfs2-users
