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-POHMELFS: Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System.
-
- Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@ioremap.net>
-
-Homepage: http://www.ioremap.net/projects/pohmelfs
-
-POHMELFS first began as a network filesystem with coherent local data and
-metadata caches but is now evolving into a parallel distributed filesystem.
-
-Main features of this FS include:
- * Locally coherent cache for data and metadata with (potentially) byte-range locks.
- Since all Linux filesystems lock the whole inode during writing, algorithm
- is very simple and does not use byte-ranges, although they are sent in
- locking messages.
- * Completely async processing of all events except creation of hard and symbolic
- links, and rename events.
- Object creation and data reading and writing are processed asynchronously.
- * Flexible object architecture optimized for network processing.
- Ability to create long paths to objects and remove arbitrarily huge
- directories with a single network command.
- (like removing the whole kernel tree via a single network command).
- * Very high performance.
- * Fast and scalable multithreaded userspace server. Being in userspace it works
- with any underlying filesystem and still is much faster than async in-kernel NFS one.
- * Client is able to switch between different servers (if one goes down, client
- automatically reconnects to second and so on).
- * Transactions support. Full failover for all operations.
- Resending transactions to different servers on timeout or error.
- * Read request (data read, directory listing, lookup requests) balancing between multiple servers.
- * Write requests are replicated to multiple servers and completed only when all of them are acked.
- * Ability to add and/or remove servers from the working set at run-time.
- * Strong authentication and possible data encryption in network channel.
- * Extended attributes support.
-
-POHMELFS is based on transactions, which are potentially long-standing objects that live
-in the client's memory. Each transaction contains all the information needed to process a given
-command (or set of commands, which is frequently used during data writing: single transactions
-can contain creation and data writing commands). Transactions are committed by all the servers
-to which they are sent and, in case of failures, are eventually resent or dropped with an error.
-For example, reading will return an error if no servers are available.
-
-POHMELFS uses a asynchronous approach to data processing. Courtesy of transactions, it is
-possible to detach replies from requests and, if the command requires data to be received, the
-caller sleeps waiting for it. Thus, it is possible to issue multiple read commands to different
-servers and async threads will pick up replies in parallel, find appropriate transactions in the
-system and put the data where it belongs (like the page or inode cache).
-
-The main feature of POHMELFS is writeback data and the metadata cache.
-Only a few non-performance critical operations use the write-through cache and
-are synchronous: hard and symbolic link creation, and object rename. Creation,
-removal of objects and data writing are asynchronous and are sent to
-the server during system writeback. Only one writer at a time is allowed for any
-given inode, which is guarded by an appropriate locking protocol.
-Because of this feature, POHMELFS is extremely fast at metadata intensive
-workloads and can fully utilize the bandwidth to the servers when doing bulk
-data transfers.
-
-POHMELFS clients operate with a working set of servers and are capable of balancing read-only
-operations (like lookups or directory listings) between them according to IO priorities.
-Administrators can add or remove servers from the set at run-time via special commands (described
-in Documentation/filesystems/pohmelfs/info.txt file). Writes are replicated to all servers, which
-are connected with write permission turned on. IO priority and permissions can be changed in
-run-time.
-
-POHMELFS is capable of full data channel encryption and/or strong crypto hashing.
-One can select any kernel supported cipher, encryption mode, hash type and operation mode
-(hmac or digest). It is also possible to use both or neither (default). Crypto configuration
-is checked during mount time and, if the server does not support it, appropriate capabilities
-will be disabled or mount will fail (if 'crypto_fail_unsupported' mount option is specified).
-Crypto performance heavily depends on the number of crypto threads, which asynchronously perform
-crypto operations and send the resulting data to server or submit it up the stack. This number
-can be controlled via a mount option.