[Gluster-devel] [Gluster-Maintainers] Proposal to change gNFS status

[Kaleb Keithley]

I personally wouldn't call three years ago — when we started to deprecate
it, in glusterfs-3.9 — a recent change.

As a community the decision was made to move to NFS-Ganesha as the
preferred NFS solution, but it was agreed to keep the old code in the tree
for those who wanted it. There have been plans to drop it from the
community packages for most of those three years, but we didn't follow
through across the board until fairly recently. Perhaps the most telling
piece of data is that it's been gone from the packages in the CentOS
Storage SIG in glusterfs-4.0, -4.1, -5, -6, and -7 with no complaints ever,
that I can recall.

Ganesha is a preferable solution because it supports NFSv4, NFSv4.1,
NFSv4.2, and pNFS, in addition to legacy NFSv3. More importantly, it is
actively developed, maintained, and supported, both in the community and
commercially. There are several vendors selling it, or support for it; and
there are community packages for it for all the same distributions that
Gluster packages are available for.

Out in the world, the default these days is NFSv4. Specifically v4.2 or
v4.1 depending on how recent your linux kernel is. In the linux kernel,
client mounts start negotiating for v4.2 and work down to v4.1, v4.0, and
only as a last resort v3. NFSv3 client support in the linux kernel largely
exists at this point only because of the large number of legacy servers
still running that can't do anything higher than v3. The linux NFS
developers would drop the v3 support in a heartbeat if they could.

IMO, providing it, and calling it maintained, only encourages people to
keep using a dead end solution. Anyone in favor of bringing back NFSv2,
SSHv1, or X10R4? No? I didn't think so.

The recent issue[1] where someone built gnfs in glusterfs-7.0 on CentOS7
strongly suggests to me that gnfs is not actually working well. Three years
of no maintenance seems to have taken its toll.

Other people are more than welcome to build their own packages from the
src.rpms and/or tarballs that are available from gluster — and support
them. It's still in the source and there are no plans to remove it. (Unlike
most of the other deprecated features which were recently removed in
glusterfs-7.)



[1] https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/issues/764

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 5:31 AM Amar Tumballi <amarts at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> As per the discussion on https://review.gluster.org/23645, recently we
> changed the status of gNFS (gluster's native NFSv3 support) feature to
> 'Depricated / Orphan' state. (ref:
> https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L185..L189).
> With this email, I am proposing to change the status again to 'Odd Fixes'
> (ref: https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L22)
>
> TL;DR;
>
> I understand the current maintainers are not able to focus on maintaining
> it as the focus of the project, as earlier described, is keeping
> NFS-Ganesha based integration with glusterfs. But, I am volunteering along
> with Xie Changlong (currently working at Chinamobile), to keep the feature
> running as it used to in previous versions. Hence the status of 'Odd
> Fixes'.
>
> Before sending the patch to make these changes, I am proposing it here
> now, as gNFS is not even shipped with latest glusterfs-7.0 releases. I have
> heard from some users that it was working great for them with earlier
> releases, as all they wanted was NFS v3 support, and not much of features
> from gNFS. Also note that, even though the packages are not built, none of
> the regression tests using gNFS are stopped with latest master, so it is
> working same from at least last 2 years.
>
> I request the package maintainers to please add '--with gnfs' (or
> --enable-gnfs) back to their release script through this email, so those
> users wanting to use gNFS happily can continue to use it. Also points to
> users/admins is that, the status is 'Odd Fixes', so don't expect any
> 'enhancements' on the features provided by gNFS.
>
> Happy to hear feedback, if any.
>
> Regards,
> Amar
>
> _______________________________________________
> maintainers mailing list
> maintainers at gluster.org
> https://lists.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/maintainers
>
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