Re: [nfsv4] draft-eisler-nfsv4-enterprise-apps-00.txt

"J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org> Thu, 14 October 2010 16:53 UTC

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Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:55:13 -0400
From: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
To: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
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References: <c8401bdd91b16fd501edd08b5957302c.squirrel@webmail.eisler.com> <20101014160917.GJ24146@fieldses.org> <D75D55EB-5F3F-4BC6-B3CB-837A2B05B106@oracle.com>
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Cc: nfsv4@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [nfsv4] draft-eisler-nfsv4-enterprise-apps-00.txt
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On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 12:21:34PM -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:
> 
> On Oct 14, 2010, at 12:09 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 03:40:21PM -0700, Mike Eisler wrote:
> >> 
> >> (apologies if this a dup)
> >> 
> >> Margaret Susairaj of Oracle and I (of NetApp) posted this
> >> internet-draft, which proposes extensions to NFSv4 for better
> >> support of enterprise applications, such as databases.
> >> 
> >> http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-eisler-nfsv4-enterprise-apps-00.txt
> >> 
> >> I have requested time at the IETF meeting in Beijing to discuss
> >> this.
> > 
> > Miscellaneous, possibly dumb questions:
> > 
> > 	- Can you define "enterprise application" for the purpose of
> > 	this draft?
> > 
> > 	- INITIALIZE: - I'm confused by the motivation.  So an
> > 	application is trying to detect whether an unused section of a
> > 	file has been corrupted?  Does it even care about corruption of
> > 	regions where it hasn't stored any data?  What does data
> > 	corruption in an unallocated region even mean?  If you care
> > 	about data corruption, don't you need additional
> > 	application-level mechanisms (say, checksums of some kind) that
> > 	would render INITIALIZE unnecessary?  I'm sure I'm just missing
> > 	something; pointers to literature welcomed.
> 
> The goal is to look for misplaced writes by applications.  In other
> words, it's a way to detect application software bugs, or
> inappropriate accesses to files by other applications.

Makes sense, thanks--though is a solution that only catches misplaced
writes to unallocated areas so useful?  I'd think it would be more
important to get writes to allocated areas--and that once you've done
that extending it to the holes wouldn't be much more trouble.

> On regular
> disks, you might also look for drive firmware bugs that cause a drive
> to write data into the wrong sectors.

They recommend not allocating space for INITIALIZE-initialized data
(pretty much required if you're going to anwer the rpc request in a
reasonable amount of time).

But I suppose you could copy the data later, or read-modify-write small
portions of it, at which point some of it would be subject to drive
errors, OK.

> > 		- Has anyone talked to e.g. linux filesystem people to
> > 		figure out support for interfaces necessary for an
> > 		application to perform INITIALIZE from a client, and/or
> > 		to let an nfs server perform it on a filesystem?
> 
> I think these are not necessarily intended for a POSIX-style file
> system API with a VFS layer.  A VFS client implementation might
> implement these operations via ioctl.  But... it might be appropriate
> for the server to report to clients that it cannot support these
> features.
> 
> > 	- ADVISE ops: the types look almost like those in posix_fadvise,
> > 	but not exactly; out of curiosity, why the differences?
> > 
> > 	- SESSION_CTL: why is managing an additional sessions more
> > 	complicated than implementing SESSION_CTL?
> 
> And I wonder why the client can't simply terminate a session and
> negotiate a new one with the new parameters.  Increasing the size of
> the session's slot table while there are still slots in use might be
> kind of interesting to implement.

They recommend draining all the other slots before sending SESSION_CTL,
at which point yes maybe it becomes not much different from destroying
one session and creating another.

--b.