Dave and Rob:

Yes.  The modified open() via the usrint library allows a program to
specify things like strip size and number of datafiles on an open that has
the O_CREAT flag set.  fcntl() could not be used in this situation, because
once a file is created via OrangeFS these properties cannot be changed.

Dave:

Thanks for the glibc info.  Still trying to determine in which version of
glibc this problem occurs.

Becky

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 9:59 AM, Rob Latham <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On 06/16/2015 08:52 AM, Dave Love wrote:
>
>> Rob Latham <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>  I wasn't involved in this feature, but it looks like OrangeFS is
>>> taking advantage of open() being declared with variable length
>>> arguments to pass in a fourth "hint" parameter.
>>>
>>
>> I'm still puzzled on what system that does anything.
>>
>
> In the old days you had two ways to access PVFS:
>
> - make a round trip through the kernel module, bouncing through quite a
> few userspace-kernelspace copies.
>
> - contact PVFS servers directly through the "system interface".  The one
> real client for the system interface is ROMIO's PVFS driver, but some of
> the early utilities would use it too (maybe still do?)
>
> OrangeFS provides a third way: link in with the orangfs library and now
> the posix open/close/read/write system calls become OrangeFS calls. no code
> changes needed.  You might not get a lot of parallelism out of it, but it
> makes many-task non-MPI workloads (like Hadoop) easier to support.
>
> So, that fourth argument was a (sneaky!) attempt to set some PVFS
> parameters without changing the posix-like API.  The less-sneaky but gross
> way to do this for most file systems is via fcntl() operations, but fcntl
> is an awful interface.
>
> ==rob
>
> --
> Rob Latham
> Mathematics and Computer Science Division
> Argonne National Lab, IL USA
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> [email protected]
> http://www.beowulf-underground.org/mailman/listinfo/pvfs2-users
>
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