2024-06-13 15:31:44

by Chuck Lever III

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Question about pNFS documentation

Hi-

> On Jun 13, 2024, at 4:35 AM, ChenXiaoSong <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I am very interested in Parallel NFS (pNFS) and want to setup a testing and debugging environment for pNFS. I found some pNFS documentation [1] [2] [3], but I still don't know how to setup Linux environment about file layout, block layout, object layout, and flexible file layout. Some documentation like spNFS(simple pNFS) is unmaintained and was dropped. Can you recommend some other detailed documentation(how to use pNFS in Linux)?
>
> Thanks,
> ChenXiaoSong.
>
> [1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/admin-guide/nfs/pnfs-block-server.rst
>
> [2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/admin-guide/nfs/pnfs-scsi-server.rst
>
> [3] https://linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/PNFS_Development

I'm not aware of recent documentation other than what you
have listed here.

Note that the Linux NFS client implements the file, block,
and flexfile layout types, but the Linux NFS server
implements only the pNFS block layout type.

I've been building out testing that we can run for each
release of NFSD that will exercise pNFS block layout
support in the Linux NFS server and client, since pNFS
block is the common denominator between our client and
server.

Look at the 9 commits at the tip of [1]. These contain
changes to kdevops that add the ability for it to set up
an iSCSI target and enable pNFS on its local NFS server.
If you can read Ansible scripts, these might help you
form recipes for you to set up your own environment
using the Linux NFS implementation and its iSCSI target
and initiator.

Admin documentation (outside of kdevops) is on the to-do
list, but hasn't been started.


--
Chuck Lever

[1] https://github.com/chucklever/kdevops/tree/pnfs-block-testing