[Gluster-devel] cluster/stripe on tmpfs

[Nathan Dauchy]

Greetings,

I am trying to get the Gluster "cluster/stripe" translator to work with
a "storage/posix" directory on a tmpfs file system.  Although
"cluster/unify" works, it presents a limit to file sizes which may be
created that I was hoping to avoid with striping.

The documentation here:
http://www.gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_Translators_v1.3#Stripe_Translator
indicates that "Stripe needs extended attribute support in the
underlying FS".

>From what I have been able to find, "recent" kernels have extended
attributes enabled when tmpfs is enabled.  However, I get the following
error when trying to create a file (directory creation is fine):

# df -hP /tmp/scratch
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
glusterfs              12G   24K   12G   1% /tmp/scratch

# touch /tmp/scratch/foo
touch: cannot touch `/tmp/scratch/foo': Operation not supported

>From this posting, it looks like there is also a "USER extended
attributes" which might be needed in order to make striping work on a
tmpfs filesystem:
http://acl.bestbits.at/pipermail/acl-devel/2007-April/002031.html


Can someone please clarify the difference between extended attributes
and user extended attributes?

Has anyone successfully gotten "cluster/stripe" working on a tmpfs file
system?

Does anyone have a lab setup where they could try the above patch and
gluster on tmpfs?  (If it works, I think it would be worth pushing the
patch into the main kernel.org tree.)

Might there be something else wrong that is preventing striping from
working?  Or a workaround to get striping working on filesystems without
extended attributes?


I am using fuse-2.7.2glfs8, glusterfs-1.3.7, and linux-2.6.20.20.

Thanks,
Nathan