[Pvfs2-developers] FUSE for PVFS

[John Chandy]

To all,

If there is any interest in running non-linux clients on PVFS, we  
have a preliminary release of pvfs2fuse which is a FUSE  
implementation of a PVFS filesystem.  It allows any OS that supports  
FUSE to mount a PVFS filesystem.  Presently, this includes Linux,  
FreeBSD, and MacOSX.

The code is a set of patches to pvfs-2.6.3 and is available at http:// 
snsl.engr.uconn.edu/downloads/pvfs2fuse.html.

I've done limited testing on Linux 2.6.9 and MacOSX 10.4.9 but it  
should work on other versions and FreeBSD as well.

After doing some testing with a 6-node Linux cluster, pvfs2fuse on  
Linux performance is comparable to the PVFS built-in client.  Iozone  
shows the PVFS client topping out at ~100 MB/s and pvfs2fuse topping  
out at ~75 MBs for large files but for small files and small record  
sizes pvfs2fuse does about 30% better.  We have yet to do any  
analysis of pvfs2fuse performance to see where the bottlenecks are.

John Chandy
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Connecticut