Re: NBD Maintainer

[Ming Lei]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 3:26 AM, Paul Clements
<paul.clements@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Andrey Utkin
> <andrey.krieger.utkin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hi Paul,
>> could you please describe
>
>> - how wide is NBD usage today (any estimation is ok),
>
> It depends somewhat on who you consider to be users. There are two
> groups of NBD "users":
>
> 1) integrators and admins (who work directly with nbd)
> 2) users of the systems and software that the first group creates
>
> My guess is that the first group is in the hundreds. The second in the
> thousands. NBD usage tends to fall into one the following classes:
>
> - support of diskless thin clients (mainly at universities and such)
> - replication (used in conjunction with some form of mirroring scheme,
> this becomes a network-raid device of sorts)
> - block device emulation/user-level block device (e.g., qemu-nbd)
> (because NBD has a fairly flexible design, including a fully
> user-level server component, it has been used by quite a few people as
> a user-level block device for various different purposes)

The 3rd one should have huge users since qemu-nbd is used
to access VM image and Openstack(nova) uses it to launch VM
instance.

>
>> - what is in a TODO list,
>
> Nothing specific, other than merging in pending patches, of which
> there are a few (check the nbd-general archives).
>
>> - what are critical bugs or important issues requiring work, if there are any.
>
> There is a network timeout issue, which is probably one of the more
> important fixes to get in:
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=770479

Last time I studied nbd driver a while to see if socket aio can be
used to improve performance, but looks not get some fruits.


Thanks,
Ming Lei
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