[Pvfs2-users] PVFS2 miscellaneous issues.

[Vikrant Kumar]

Hello,

After a week of working with pvfs2 using both TCP and IB, Im facing a 
couple of issues. Im trying to summarize them here, including the ones I 
have reported earlier.

1. pvfs2-TCP:
    This installation seems to be generally robust. But one issues has 
been that on the  metadata-server the load average is always at a 
minimum of two. By this I mean that even with no process showing up as 
using CPU in "top" the load average using uptime is two. This I started 
to notice after the pvfs2 installation, so Im beginning to suspect it 
might be due to it but I cant verify it right now. And this observation 
is when there is no pvfs2 file system activity.
    - Another problem is related to using unix "cp ". if i try to copy a 
file onto or from pvfs2 it throws the following message, but the file 
seems to be ok. This might be just some configuration issue. This 
problem is also observed for pvfs2-IB setup!

    $ cp /tmp/file /mnt/pvfs2/file
    cp: setting attribute `system.pvfs2.dh' for `file': Invalid argument
    cp: setting attribute `system.pvfs2.md' for `file': Invalid argument

2. pvfs2-IB: ( using topspin IB)
    This installation has been quite problematic to the point that it 
required restarting the pvfs2 server and client a couple of times. There 
are a host of issues. Interestingly load average is not an issue on the 
pvfs2-IB installation.
    - pvfs2-client-core uses up 100% CPU. I have observed this once and 
other people using the file system have also observer the same. Seems to 
be IB specific only.
    - metadata operations like "ls" at times dont return and the 
terminal has to be killed.
    - files and directories get created that cannot be deleted
    - I/O performance also keeps on fluctuating a lot. ( I see on pvfs2 
FAQs solution to similar problems, one using "noreservation mode on ext3 
volumes" and the other by removing pvfs2 from cron jobs, but I havent 
been able to look into it in detail)

Any help in resolving these issues would be much appreciated!

Thanks
Vikrant