[Gluster-users] Update on internal development

[Anand Babu Periasamy]

John Leach wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 18:22 +0200, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
>> On Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:01:46 +0200
> 
>> And, I forgot to mention: it took me around 1 hour of bonnie to crash a server
>> in a classical distribute setup...
>> Please stop featurism and start reliability.
> 
> Hi Stephan,
> 
> I just reviewed the GlusterFS commit logs for the release-2.0 branch and
> *every single commit since Jul 17th has been a bug fix*, with a
> reference to the bugzilla entry.
> 
> Practically all the commits before then through to May (where I gave up
> looking) are also bugfixes, just without bugzilla references - I
> couldn't find one serious new feature mentioned.
> 
> I'm not saying your problems aren't real, but the Z research folk do
> seem to have been taking reliability seriously for a long time now.
> 
> John.

We are happy to see our community advocating both sides. Negative feedbacks are
important for us to improve.

2.0 has been frozen since 2.0.0 release. New features are scheduled for 2.1 release.

Recently we recruited experienced storage professionals and created a RAS team
(reliability, availability, serviceability). Their goal is to solely improve
reliability and make GlusterFS resilient. Here are some of the initiatives..

* Automated regression / stress / functionality tests
* Unit test framework
* Patch-by-patch code audit
* Increased the size of hardware lab significantly
* Gtrace framework (similar solaris dtrace)

We are particularly excited about Gtrace, because it will help us narrow down faults
fairly quickly. Users will be able to report bugs by posting gtrace dumps which contain
complete information about the bug than log files. It is easier than launching gdb or
strace :).

You will also see a volume-generator tool to automatically generate volume specification
files. This avoids learning time and human-errors while crafting your volume design.

Because GlusterFS runs on many hardware and operating system distributions, it is very
hard for us to test and certify all combinations. What makes worse is.. GlusterFS itself
is programmable. One solution to this problem is to reduce the number of variables. Then
it will allow us to certify those models. Volume specification generator will have
well tested options only.

Gluster Storage Platform with embedded kernel, web based management and monitoring will
remove most of the variables today. We will then be able to provide certified list of
hardware and client operating systems. We are also adding NFS, CIFS and WebDAV support.

-- 
Anand Babu Periasamy
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