On Thu, 17 Dec 1998, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>
> Hmmm, linux can work with suns, but I would take issue with the term
> "perfectly". There are a number of rough edges to be overcome,
> especially with linux servers and sun clients. sun servers and linux
> clients are a safer bet, but need tuning. linux servers and linux
> clients seem to be fine, and of course sun to sun is also fine.
>
> Two difficulties that we have encountered are:
>
> First, that the wsize/rsize need to be set on a linux client to get
> decent performance reading/writing to sun servers. We use
> wsize=8192,rsize=8192.
I haven't see this as a problem with recent kernels. I mount files
from solaris servers on my linux boxes with no problems...
>
> Second, one needs turning off caching on sun mounts of linux exports.
> We discovered that this was necessary when trying to make a really large
> package (perl) on a Sun from sources exported from a linux box.
> Curiously, the make would get 70% of the way through and then bomb, and
> it would bomb at different points (reading different files) on each try.
> What was happening was that the cache image of the files had a certain
> (low) probability of being corrupted -- the direct symptom was that a
> stat of the files showed them to be "empty" (they weren't, of course) --
> sometimes. Then a few minutes later, they'd stat correctly and maybe a
> different one would be "empty" and have the wrong timestamp on the next
> make attempt. We'd lived with this problem for years without realizing
> it because the probability was rather low (and probably depended on the
> volume of NFS traffic) and because we were exporting userspace from Sun
> to linux and not the other way around, which normally kept the
> linux->sun NFS traffic low.
>
> It may be that caching is fixed by now in the linux nfsd/mountd combo --
> I haven't messed with this recently -- but it is an area of concern that
> one should be aware of when thinking about engineering a network. At
> the very least, one should look into the more recent versions of nfs
> (especially the kernel nfs) to see if they have addressed/repaired the
> caching problem. The turn-off-caching solution seems to work well
> enough as well, but probably costs a bit in performance if that is very
> important to you.
>
the only caching issue i have seen is the "noac" option on sun
automounting that I reported earlier this year. Without this,
linux writes to a solaris server will run at speeds of around 5kb/sec
or less. With this option set on the solaris clients, nfs writes
get about as close to "wire speed" as nfs writes can.
-
Linux SMP list: FIRST see FAQ at http://www.irisa.fr/prive/mentre/smp-faq/
To Unsubscribe: send "unsubscribe linux-smp" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
