OpenSolaris

1. Project: NFS version 4.1 pNFS
   1. Announcements
   2. Events
   3. News
   4. Blogs
   5. Discussions
   6. Leaders
   7. Observers
   8. Downloads
      1. How to Setup and Use pNFS
      2. June 2007 Release Notes
      3. August 2007 Release Notes
      4. October 2007 Release Notes
      5. March 2008 Release Notes
   9. NFSv4.1 Bakeathon
   10. NFS version 4.1 pNFS: Project Logistics
       1. NFS version 4.1 pNFS: FAQ
   11. Demos
       1. pNFS Basics
       2. pNFS Basics (Japanese Version)
       3. pNFS Basics (Chinese Version)
       4. pNFS Basics (German Version)
       5. pNFS Basics (Spanish Version)
       6. pNFS Basics (French Version)
       7. pNFS Basics (Russian Version)
       8. pNFS Basics (Brazilian Portuguese Version)
   12. Project Documentation
       1. NFSv4.1 MDS and DS Design
       2. speadm(1M)

Release Notes for OpenSolaris pNFS — June 2007

These are the release notes for the June 2007 release of the source code and binaries for the OpenSolaris project "NFS version 4.1 pNFS". The purpose of this document is to give you information about this distribution, its capabilities, known problems, & installation instructions. A separate document contains directions on how to configure pNFS clients and servers.

We value your feedback & thank you for trying pNFS!

If you have questions or comments about this document, the software being released, the logistics of the pNFS project, please email them to nfsv41 dash discuss at opensolaris dot org.

If you run into problems or issues not mentioned in the known issue list below, please report them via the email address mentioned above. Provide the release name (on-pnfs-draft10-onnv66-20070625) as well as information about the problem. Information that will help in determining the root cause of a problem is documented in the FAQ.

Although we will not be providing patches or fixes to this distribution, we will enter the issues into our tracking tool and evaluate each issue for inclusion in future releases of this project. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please contact us.

This release is based off of OS/Net (ON) Nevada Build 66.

Functionality

This release implements the basic elements needed for doing files-based pNFS as defined by draft 10 of the NFSv4.1 specification. This specification is owned by the IETF and the latest draft may be viewed on the IETF website. Various versions of the draft can also be viewed on the NFSv4.1 Editor's website.

At a high level, this distribution supports separation of data and metadata, parallel I/O from the pNFS clients to pNFS data servers, and Sessions, a mandatory-to-implement feature of the NFSv4.1 specification and a prerequisite for pNFS.

Since we are early in the development cycle, some features have yet to be implemented. We recommend this release for experimental or casual use (i.e., install it just to "play around" with pNFS).

This release is not to be used in production environments. There are known issues which will cause system crashes.

Known Issues

• There is currently no way to remove data objects from the data server. Removal of files from the metadata server will work as normal, but this won't deallocate the space on the data server.

• Accessing pNFS files directly at the MDS is not supported. The file's attributes, including size, will be correct, but the file's data will read as all zeros. Modifying the file's data locally at the MDS will succeed; however, the client will not see this data.

• The Connectathon holey file test fails intermittently with the a message like "non-zero data read back from hole (offset 41780)".

• This distribution may not interoperate with the Linux pNFS implementation being developed. Known errors include NFS4ERR_BAD_STATEID (10025), NFS4ERR_STALE_CLIENTID (10022) & NFS4ERR_CLID_INUSE (10017).

• After an MDS is rebooted, a client with an active session may not be able to recover, even though the client may have unmounted the pNFS file system. The error NFS4ERR_BADSESSION (10052) is likely to appear in the system error log. Rebooting the client may be required to recover from this condition.

• The use of Kerberos with NFSv4.1 mounts is untested and discouraged.

• RDMA is not supported for NFSv4.1

• Running the pNFS client in a non-global zone is not supported.

• Running the MDS or DS in a non-global zone is not supported.

• The mdsadm and dservadm commands are very preliminary and will be changed in the future. No man pages are available, but the "how to" document contains descriptions of them.

• Support for NFSv4.0 in this distribution does not work and may cause system crashes. Use of NFSv4.0 is strongly discouraged. It is suggested that you set NFS_CLIENT_VERSMAX=3 in /etc/default/nfs and perform NFSv4.1 mounts using -o vers=4.

Instructions for Installing

The format for releasing pNFS binaries is BFU archives. To use BFU, check out the instructions on the OpenSolaris.org website. We recommend installing Solaris Express, Community Edition (CD, DVD), then using BFU to update your machine(s) with the BFU archives provided. A good summary of this process is documented at the ON download site. Pay attention to steps 1, 2 and 3b.