Open Stack

All,

I wanted to follow up on the e-mail thread [1] on Cloning support in the 
NFS driver.  The purpose of this e-mail is to provide the plan for the 
NFS driver going forward as I see it.

First, I am aware that the driver has gone quite some time without care 
and feeding.  For a number of reasons, the Public Cloud team within IBM 
is currently dependent upon the NFS driver working properly for the 
cloud environment we are building.  Given our current dependence on the 
driver we are planning on picking up the driver and maintaining it.

The first step in this process was getting the existing patch that adds 
snapshot support for NFS [2] rebased.  I did this work a couple of weeks 
ago and also got all the unit tests working for the unit test 
environment on the master branch.  I now see that it is in merge 
conflict again, I plan to continue to keep the patch up-to-date.

Erlon has been investigating issues with attaching snapshots.  It 
appears that this may be related to AppArmor running on the system where 
the VM is running and attachment is being attempted.  I am hoping to 
look into the other questions posed in the patch review in the next week 
or two.

The next step is to create a dependent patch, upon the snapshot patch, 
to implement cloning.  I am planning to also undertake this work.  I am 
assuming that getting the cloning support in place shouldn't be too 
difficult once snapshots are working as it will be just a matter of 
using the support from the remotefs driver.

The last piece of work we have in flight is working on adding QoS 
support to the NFS driver.  We have the following spec proposed to get 
that work started: [3]

So, we are in the process of bringing the NFS driver up to good 
standing.  During this process we would greatly appreciate reviews and 
input from those of you who have previously worked on the driver in 
order to expedite integration of the necessary changes. I feel it is in 
the best interest of the community to get the driver updated and 
supported given that it is the 4th most used driver according to our 
user survey.  I think it would not look good to our users if it were to 
suddenly be removed.

Thanks to all of your for your support in this effort!

Jay

[1] 
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-August/102193.html

[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/147186/

[3] https://review.openstack.org/361456