I'm really excited about the NFS client cache stuff.
It's crazy that the whole system grinds to a near halt if it loses connection to the NFS server, from an end user perspective.
I look forward to some time in the future when Debian incorporates this kernel. I prefer to use stock kernels. I used to enjoy messing with my distros, but these days I prefer stability.
> It's crazy that the whole system grinds to a near halt if it loses connection to the NFS server, from an end user perspective.
Indeed. The only solution that works consistently, if the NFS server is not coming back up anytime soon: Enable an NFS server on localhost; add the address of failed NFS server to a local adapter; wait for retry to finally get an error answer; kill ip address and local NFS server.
Client side caching will only delay the inevitable.
Sure, the kernel caches everything in RAM by default (as with any other file system, not just NFS).
If you also want to cache on local disk, there's "cachefilesd", which does exactly that. You can specify a certain percentage of the disk that should be kept empty, and cachefilesd will use the rest of the available space for caching.
(It works very well, but is broken on kernel 5.x for me (it just doesn't read from the local cache, even though everything looks fine). But I just mention it off-hand, I don't have time to diagnose this in more detail, I just remain on 4.15 for the time being.)
NFS has had caching modes since the beginning. Or at least as long as I have been using it. It's behavior can be controlled by using async or sync options.
NFSv4 is actually quite nice. Anything earlier should be avoided.
Wow, never thought I would see this. Are you saying that based on experience or just looking at its feature set?
I used to work with NFS performance on NetApp filers at NetApp, and NFSv4(.1,.2) we’re god awful. I used to see almost 1/3 of v3 performance in simple read and write ops. On top of it I need to align all planet to get it to not fail with (EIO) during the test. Is that not the case anymore? Did somebody do some magic I missed in the last couple of years?
I've seen that thread before but just read it through in its entirety. All I got from it was "OpenBSD people are assholes, and not in the Torvalds 'constructive asshole' way, just in the 'being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole' way".
There is few strong words here and there, but nothing more injurious than what you would hear by staying in a school for 5 minutes. Once you understand the liking of such words by their writers, it's easy to mentally replace them by more politically correct version if it bother you. Moreover, they just critize tech, not people and that's an important distinction imo.
The big problem with that thread isn't profanity or insults or tone. It's that the developers are repeatedly refusing to provide any detail or justification for their less-than-polite assertions that failed to answer the question. Some degree of insults and profanity can be tolerated if there's also useful content, but Henning Brauer and Theo de Raadt didn't make any useful contributions to that thread.
Sorry. No. There's no "political correctness" at here
Theo's comments in particular seem to start at
"NFSv4 is a gigantic joke on everyone."
This isn't politically incorrect, it's just noise. Nothing is gained from this comment. Even Linus with his infamous "rants" would have actual commentary laced in, Theo is just being dismissive
After someone reaffirms that they would like to use it, he replies
"Hahahahaha. That's a good one."
"I guess by "all the other protocols" you must be rejecting all the rest
of your network traffic as "not protocols" or "not services"."
Well, to be fair there was at least one poster who suggested that OP use SFTP instead of NFS... I mean why bother with a vegetable peeler when you could use a chisel instead?
So yeah, like you said--absolutely no useful information was conveyed in that thread. Besides any lurking bystanders learning those "in the group" are complete assholes.
Wow. What a toxic community. I'd never build a business or platform around a community like that--any time I had a question I'd be constantly worried all the maintainers would bite my head off. Coupled with the fact that I can't be alone in thinking that, I'd also worry about the long term success of a project.
And yeah, OpenBSD has been around forever.... but you'd be hard to call them anything more than a tiny little niche operating system. Probably because of how toxic they are.
Wow. That guy can go fuck himself. In fact every snarky worthless reply to that poor original poster can go fuck themself. Man. That is some hot garbage...
It's crazy that the whole system grinds to a near halt if it loses connection to the NFS server, from an end user perspective.
I look forward to some time in the future when Debian incorporates this kernel. I prefer to use stock kernels. I used to enjoy messing with my distros, but these days I prefer stability.