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A scene from Ireland

todo

Another TODO list : nfsd

I love todo-lists. They are liberating. If you don't know what to work on next, you write a TODO list. Then you just work through the things on the list. Or maybe you don't, but having written them all down, they no longer rattle around in your brain and distract you from more important things.

Anyway, to the point. Someone recently asked me what my priorities for the Linux NFS server were and while I'm not spending a lot of time on it at the moment, there are things that I would like to see done, so I wrote a little todo list. And having written it, I might as well share it. So here it is...

BULLET - auto-adjust the number of nfsd threads. I'd really like the sysadmin not to have to choose a number, but it should still be possible to set a maximum. I imagine: BULLET - slow growth when there is high load and we have never had this many running before BULLET - slow decay in numbers when <50% are in use fast growth when we have dropped below the highwater mark and load is high BULLET - A maximum that is somehow based on the requested number of threads BULLET - Some way of measuring if extra threads in actually improving throughput, and feed that in to the growth calculations.
BULLET - Find a way to overcome the current bottle neck when replying to requests on a udp socket.

BULLET - explore whether it would help to make the scheduling of nfsd threads more SMP (and NUMA) aware.

BULLET - Finalise and implement upcall changes to support new NFSv4 features like auth-type selection and fs_locations

BULLET - make exporting of filesystem via NFSv4 work more smoothly (mountd should automatically create the 'virtual filesystem' thing).

TODO list for mdadm

I not only have a TODO list for linux/md/raid, but for mdadm -- the userspace md management tool -- too.

It is mostly focussed on getting 2.0 ready for release, but there are some bits that can wait until after 2.0

It includes a test-suite, a '--hostid' flag to tie arrays to host and make automatic assembly more possible, and improvements to support for version-1 superblocks.

TODO list of Linux md/raid

I've just spent a while hunting through old emails and todo-lists and patches and my brain, to try to create a fairly complete TODO list of md/raid in linux.

Rather than keeping it to myself, I thought I would let you, my loyal reader, see it too.

It mentions various enhancements including not kicking drives on read-errors, backgroup check/repair, sysfs support, adding devices to linear arrays and fixing particularly involving version-1 superblocks but also improving read-only mode, making 'linear' cope with v.large devices and other things.

Ideas for Aether

I've just installed aether-1.4 for this website and made a few enhancements that I might submit one day.

They include allowing a blog to select entries from another blog based on tags in the [entry] field. Thus my page has a News section which contains all items from my front page that mention 'raid' in the entry tag.

Also a blog can show just a list of pages (or the summaries there-of), so my page is now a blog of precisely three other pages. These are sorted by modify time.

Other changes I am contemplating include:

  • Once a password has been typed in, the "Edit" and "New" links at the bottom of the page become simple links that contain the password. This way I only need to type the password once. There would need to be an easy way to forget the password of course
    BULLET - Almost all my aether usage is using it as an error document, so the meaningless "me" doesn't appear. But when I edit a page it has to use a real URL, as you cannot post to an error document (I think). The "post" should pass in the preferred prefix so that when I come out of editing, I am back in the error-document space. (Does that make sense to anyone but me).