zabbo

Two weeks ago we received the approval to release the CRFS source code. It can be found at http://oss.oracle.com/projects/crfs/. Last week I sent a message to linux-fsdevel letting people know CRFS was up. I suppose I should be embarrassed that both Val and Evgeniy mentioned it before I did.

Over the last few days I fixed a few bugs in CRFS that were messing up kernel builds. You can now unpack and build a linux kernel in a CRFS client mount. There are some lingering bugs, of course, but it’s enough for us to get a rough idea of the performance to expect relative to NFS.

As usual, the comparison doesn’t seem very sporting. A make -j2 in CRFS on this particular client took about 50 seconds, NFS took about 3 minutes. The crfsd process on the server was writing to a single spindle. The nfs server, linux knfsd, was writing to a ram disk. Even with the advantage of much faster storage, NFS can’t keep up because it’s caching model requires it to hit the network much more often than CRFS.

The next major step in CRFS is to get the cache coherency protocol working so that multiple clients can be mounted. I think I’m about a quarter of the way into the first draft of an implementation that only covers file data. It’s looking pretty good so far.