[PVFS-users] Interoperability

[Rob Ross]

On Fri, 21 May 2004, Nathan Poznick wrote:

> Thus spake Bill Pappas:
> > I'm totally new to pvfs.  I want to know what interoperability issues I
> > may run into.  Has anyone run this on RedHAt AS 2.1 or 3.0 i32 or i64? 
> > Or on Suse Ent. 8 or 9?  I'm just looking for general comments on your
> > experiences.   What is difficult to deploy on the platforms, or is pvfs
> > flexible enough for any Linux 2.4 kernel.
> > Finally, what has (if any) been your experience with the 2.6 kernel?
> 
> Interoperability between different distributions should be fine, however
> you won't be able to use PVFS1 in a mixed ia32 / ia64 environment.

Actually Nathan, mixed IA32/IA64 should be just fine.  Do you know of 
specific problems?

> The recent Redhat kernels will likely give you the most trouble with the
> PVFS1 kernel module, but most of those issues should be sorted out with
> the next release.  There is no PVFS1 kernel module for 2.6.x kernels.

Further, there is no plan to implement a PVFS1 kernel module for the 2.6 
kernels.  Despite our enthusiasm for applying patches and fixing bugs in 
PVFS1, we don't plan to invest that level of effort.

> You might want to take a look at PVFS2 if you're just getting started.
> PVFS2 interoperates between different platforms (ia32/ia64) as well as
> between platforms with different endianness.  It also has a 2.6 kernel
> module (but no 2.4 kernel module yet).

I would suggest having a look at this as well, if you don't need to deploy 
something right away.  2.4 support will be implemented over the summer, 
and we should have a "production quality" release by the end of the year 
if not sooner.  This is where we are focusing our efforts now.

Regards,

Rob