Hi all: I'm having growing problems with PVFS2, to the point where it really looks like PVFS2 isn't ready for production use. The updates in software versions aren't helping (and in fact, seem to be making things worse).
My production headnode now kernel panics on average 1-2 a day due to pvfs kmod. I'm also now seeing some compute nodes kernel panic blaming the pvfs2 kmod (which did NOT happen with an older version of pvfs2). I'm now recovering 2-3 nodes a day due to pvfs2 kernel panics! To make things worse, with the most recent OrangeFS build I have, any time a system reboots, it is not possible to mount on boot; rather, a user MUST log in as root and manually mount pvfs. If I don't catch a system quickly enough, then it goes back into "production" automatically, but any attempt to run jobs fails/blows up. This has cost us many production runs, including those which we are under contract to complete nightly. I was blaming the pvfs2 problems on an older kernel (my current production system is CentOS 5.2 / Rocks 5.1 based), but my brand new, Rocks 6 (CentOS 6.2) is experiencing the same won't-mount-on-boot problem that I previously posted here, but I'm not getting any responses (The only error message is a very cryptic number). I cannot bring my new head node live without correcting this problem, and I cannot continue to operate with such an unstable problem. Frankly, I'm very confused...I hear reports of it being successfully used elsewhere, and I see what looks like a very good architecture and reports that suggest a very through development team. And yet, pvfs2 has been the #1 source of problems and failures on my cluster since the first day I built it nearly 5 years ago now. I've never seen very good performance, and nearly all of my "hardware stability problems" have actually been caused by pvfs2-kmod. What gives? Are my problems fixable, or do I need to move to a different technology? Thanks! --Jim _______________________________________________ Pvfs2-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.beowulf-underground.org/mailman/listinfo/pvfs2-users
