Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:51:09 -0400 (EDT) From: Rick Macklem <rmacklem@uoguelph.ca> To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: NFS version 4.0 for FreeBSD-CURRENT Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.63.0903151520590.16993@muncher.cs.uoguelph.ca>
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As some of you might already know, I have been working on an
implementation of NFSv4.0 for BSD for some time now. My original
interest in NFSv4.0 came about because I felt that a component
of it called delegations might permit significant performance
improvements along the lines of what I had hoped to achieve with
an experimental protocol I called Not Quite NFS long long ago.
To experiment with the use of delegations, I needed an implementation
and I got to work on that around Fall 2001/Winter 2002. (If I had
had any idea how long it was going to take to get to a near production
quality implementation, I would have never started, but I'm finally
there.:-)
There has been some indication of interest in incorporating this
into FreeBSD-CURRENT/8 and I am posting here to start a discussion
of this.
I feel (and Robert Watson seems to agree) that replacing the current
NFS implementation would be impractical for at least one release
cycle. It does include NFSv2 and 3 support in it, but it would take
some time to gain experience with the implementation and incorporate
all the features in the current release into it. As such, it seems
appropriate to have it live side-by-side with the current implementation.
Here's a brief overview of the current code base:
- approximately 75,000 lines of C in the following subdirs
nfscl - generic client code that can be shared by the ports.
(This includes doing the RPCs using code that avoids most of my
infamous macros and handling functions for the NFSv4 state.)
nfsclient - a copy of sys/nfsclient tweaked so that it calls functions
in nfscl instead of doing the v2,3 RPCs. (As such, it retains the
caching semantics, etc of the current client.)
nfs - functions shared by the client and server
nfsd - the server code
nfscrypto - a couple of small functions for helping with RPCSEC_GSS
(these aren't required for Doug Rabson's new RPC code)
Current work:
I am currently in the process of converting it to use Doug Rabson's new
RPC layer and re-organizing things so that the two servers can co-reside
in the kernel (the client already does co-reside). This work should be
completed in a few weeks. Beyond that, the only NFSv4.0 feature I might be
looking at that isn't yet implemented is referrals.
Code stability:
The server code ran here in two FreeBSD NFS servers for a couple of years
without difficulties. The client has been tested fairly extensively for
the Mac OS X port (25 iMacs in a lab here + about 350 downloads by
others). At this point I suspect bugs will be mostly related to
architectures other than i386 and, maybe, issues running on fast,
heavily SMP machines. (The code is SMP safe, to the best of my
knowledge.)
What to call it?
I currently call it newnfs with options NFSCL and NFSD, but I could
care less what it is called. Calling it nfsv4 seemed inaccurate, since
it does have nfsv2 and v3 support in it.
So, what do folks think? rick
ps: I haven't even looked at NFSv4.1 implementation yet.
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