[Gluster-devel] Progress on brick multiplexing

[Jeff Darcy]

For those who don't know, "brick multiplexing" is a term some of us have been using to mean running multiple brick "stacks" inside a single process with a single protocol/server instance.  Discussion from a month or so ago is here:

  http://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2016-June/049801.html

Yes, I know I need to turn that into a real feature page.  Multiplexing was originally scoped as a 4.0 feature, but has gained higher priority because many of the issues it addresses have turned out to be limiting factors in how many bricks or volumes we can support and people running container/hyperconverged systems are already chafing under those limits.  In response, I've been working on this feature recently.  I've just pushed a patch, which is far enough along to pass our smoke test.

  http://review.gluster.org/#/c/14763/

While it does pass smoke, I know it would fail spectacularly in a full regression test - especially tests that involve killing bricks.  There's still a *ton* of work to be done on this.  However, having this much of the low-level infrastructure working gives me hope that work on the higher-level parts can proceed more swiftly.  Interested parties are invited to check out the patch and suggest improvements.  Thanks!