[Gluster-users] RFC: beginning to phase out legacy Gluster NFS, to be eventually replaces with NFS-Ganesha

[Kaleb Keithley]

Hi,

Some of you may have noticed that one of the roadmap items for GlusterFS 3.8 is to change the default for the volume option nfs.disable from 'off' to 'on'.

If you haven't noticed, then this email will serve to call your attention to it.

Changing the nfs.disable volume option from 'off' to 'on' means that when a volume is started (i.e. exported) that the Gluster NFS (or gnfs) server is not automatically started at the same time.

This change is being made to support the transition from gnfs to NFS-Ganesha. NFS-Ganesha[1] is a user-space NFS server that supports NFSv3, NFSv4, NFSv4.1, pNFS, and beyond; while gnfs is NFSv3 only.

More users are asking for NFSv4 and pNFS and the features they provide, especially as the implementations in the Linux (and other) kernels and the NFS-Ganesha mature.

The gnfs implementation isn't well suited to being extended to support NFSv4 – NFSv4 is a very different protocol – and little effort is being devoted these days to maintaining the gnfs implementation. There is a fairly substantial effort being devoted to NFS-Ganesha.

Starting with GlusterFS-3.7 preliminary support was added for NFS-Ganesha, but legacy gnfs was kept as the default – using NFS-Ganesha means explicitly disabling gnfs. The next phase, proposed for GlusterFS 3.8, as noted above, is the change to the default for nfs.disable. This means when a volume is created, if you want to use gnfs, you will need to explicitly enable it by issuing a `gluster volume set $volname nfs.disable off` command before starting the volume. Anyone who has scripts or other automation for creating gluster volumes that wants to keep using gnfs will need to modify their tooling accordingly.

At least through GlusterFS-3.8 the gnfs server (nfs-server xlator, gluster and glusterd pieces) will continue to be available, i.e. they will be compiled and included in the community GlusterFS packages that are provided. In some future version (perhaps in whatever version follows 3.8, either 3.9 or 4.0) those parts may no longer be compiled by default; there will be a configuration option to enable compiling them.

N.B. we have no plans at this time to remove the sources from the tree, however ongoing maintenance of them will need to be taken up by the community.

If you have any questions or concerns about this migration to NFS-Ganesha or the change to the default value for the nfs.disable option, please feel free to post them here in mailto:gluster-users at gluster.org.

Regards,

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Kaleb KEITHLEY

[1] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/