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American Megatrends's NAS based on custom FreeBSD
Asmodai writes "American Megatrends unveiled its StorTrends NAS software with NDMP support. This piece of software, which plugs into the StorTrends and ServTrends storage solutions, is a custom developed FreeBSD.
Looks interesting for those who are interested in NAS and SAN and the subsequent managing and monitoring." It's interesting that this press release (because that's what it is) mentions FreeBSD by name.
I've never had a custom-designed system based on FreeBSD (or Linux) but I would think that it would drive me insane, knowing that it was based on FreeBSD, but unable to use any of the flexibility FreeBSD offers.
Suppose, for example, the thing didn't support ftp. You know FreeBSD supports proftpd but I bet you are forbidden from installing it on the box. Suppose there is a huge bug in the mta on the box (never!). Do you wait for the vendor to supply a patch or do you start hacking?
The situation is similar to using a package manager. Whenever I install SuSE I try to keep it purely RPM-based but inveitably there is some piece of software I end up compiling myself, without making it a package before installing. From that point on I abandon yast and SuSE config because they don't know about that software and will happily trounce it's config files if one isn't careful. (Strangely, I never worry installing a port on a FreeBSD box. I'm more confident that the port isn't going to be sticking its nose where it doesn't belong.)
I have actually had a (semi-tech) client refuse to use FreeBSD based on the devil mascot. I think it's rather foolish, but they said that they didn't want their company to be associated with satanic symbols. Apparently after pitching the idea to use FreeBSD, he went on the 'net and saw the logo.
We used Linux for their application instead and everything is working well. I wonder if he would have been offended by a fish?
Has anyone else run across anything like this?
load "linux",8,1
I haven't paid much attention to the NetBSD kernel development (especially the NFS part) recently. As far as I know, quite a lot of efforts on "zero copy" were made to the NetBSD kernel in order to beef up the NFS send/receive performance with NICs.
If I understand correctly, a main bottleneck in the NetBSD kernel is memory copying from the user space to the kernel space.
Under regular circumstance, network i/o buffers are copied from user processes to kernel on the send side, and from kernel to user processes on the receiving side.
By implementing this "zero copy" method, the above copying process is eliminated and a gain in the system performance as well as network performance should be seen.
What I am interested to know is that, how mature is this "zero copy" and the overall NetBSD kernel (particularly NFS and the NIC component) to handle great amount of TCP network i/o.
Anyone cares to enlighten?