[Gluster-users] glfs 3, fuse, and booster ?

[Mark Mielke]

On 02/04/2010 11:17 AM, Daniel Maher wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After reading through the documentation related to Gluster 3, Fuse, 
> and the (new'ish) Booster option, i find myself a little bit cloudy on 
> exactly what their respective relationships are - in particular, how 
> Booster fits into the picture.
>
> Is Booster a replacement for Fuse ?  The documentation - especially 
> the section entitled « Configuring Booster to Use Alone » - would seem 
> to suggest this is the case.
>
> If this is true, is Fuse still required for client operations ?  
> Server operations ?  If yes, what is the relationship of Fuse to 
> Booster ?  If no, why are we bothering with Fuse at all, given the 
> performance problems and such ?
>
> Thank you for your feedback.
>
>

Booster is an accelerator that can reduce dependency on fuse. In 
particular, there are system calls that booster does not catch, and in 
these cases, having fuse running can be a good backup in case one of 
these system calls do get executed. Some applications may run with 
booster stand-alone without fuse, but based on the system call list, and 
my knowledge of how commonly used libraries such as glibc perform 
private linking to prevent applications such as booster from overriding 
system calls through symbol table overrides, that the list is pretty 
narrow. Perhaps Apache using only basic modules will work. Will higher 
level modules such as PHP work? This depends on how they load scripts. 
If they use STDIO/fopen() in particular, I believe it will not work, as 
booster does not override fopen() (the last time I checked?), and 
fopen() may call system call open() using a private linking table that 
booster cannot override.

Cheers,
mark

-- 
Mark Mielke<mark at mielke.cc>