[Gluster-devel] Pluggable interface for erasure coding?

[Xavier Hernandez]

Hi Niels,

On 02/03/17 07:58, Niels de Vos wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I think this is a topic/question that has come up before, but I can not
> find any references or feature requests related to it. Because there are
> different libraries for Erasure Coding, it would be interesting to be
> able to select alternatives to the bundled implementation that Gluster
> has.

I agree.

> Are there any plans to make the current Erasure Coding
> implementation more pluggable?

Yes. I've had this in my todo list for a long time. Once I even tried to 
implement the necessary infrastructure but didn't finish and now the 
code has changed too much to reuse it.

> Would this be a possible feature request,
> or would it require a major rewrite of the current interface?

At the time I tried it, it required major changes. Now that the code has 
been considerably restructured to incorporate the dynamic code 
generation feature, maybe it doesn't require so many changes, though I'm 
not sure.

>
> Here at FAST [0] I have briefly spoken to Per Simonsen from MemoScale
> [1]. This company offers a (proprietary) library for Erasure Coding,
> optimized for different architectures, and  with some unique(?) features
> for recovering a failed fragment/disk. If Gluster allows alternative
> implementations for the encoding, it would help organisations and
> researchers to get results of their work in a distributed filesystem.
> And with that, spread the word about how easy to adapt and extend
> Gluster is :-)

That could be interesting. Is there any place where I can find 
additional information about the features of this library ?

Xavi

>
> Thanks,
> Niels
>
>
> 0. https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast17
> 1. https://memoscale.com/
>