From:	Andreas Dilger <adilger@home.com>
Subject: New OBD filesystem release
To:	Linux FS development list <linux-fsdevel@vger.rutgers.edu>,
Date:	Thu, 9 Mar 2000 14:00:12 -0700 (MST)

                        OBDFS v0.004 Released
			    March 9, 2000

The latest test version of OBDFS has been released at www.lustre.org.
OBDFS is an Object-Based Filesystem architecture which is part of the
Lustre project.  OBDFS separates the handling of storage objects, such
as files or redirectors to files from the on-disk storage.  This 
allows easy implementation of logical object drivers such as RAID,
clustering, snapshots, and remote device access.

WARNING: this is experimental software. Read the file COPYING for
warranties (not) made to you.  Also back up your data!

OBDFS works with the Linux kernel v2.3.34 and later.  The on-disk
storage format is ext2.  We have implemented a filesystem/VFS driver,
the on-disk ext2 driver, as well as a logical snapshot driver which
allows one to mount a single device multiple times with different
dated versions of the files in each mount point, based on a copy on
write scheme.  There is also an RPC logical driver (remote device
access) under development which is not yet included in this release.

This file system is 100% page cache based (including metadata), and
until there is a memory pressure callback scheme between the kernel
allocator and file systems, your system can hang when the file system
has allocated very many dirty pages in the page cache in a short time. 

More information is available at http://www.lustre.org/

Since v0.003 was released, the following changes have been made:

- OBD interface specification document
- page write cache in filesystem greatly improves write performance
- kernel daemon to manage cache based on I/O load
- auto loading of class driver modules
- many bug fixes

Note: there is recovery (e2fsck) for OBDFS by itself, but NOT for
OBDFS with snapshots.  We hope to be in a position to pursue journal
based recovery for this file system. 

You can download this latest stable (numbered) release of OBDFS at:

ftp://ftp.lustre.org/pub/lustre/obd-0.004.tgz

Incremental (dated) releases (which may be less stable) are available at:

ftp://ftp.lustre.org/pub/obd/obd-<date>.tgz

Or you can download the bleeding-edge code from anonymous CVS via:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.lustre.org:/cvsroot login
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.lustre.org:/cvsroot co obd

There are mailing lists at http://www.lustre.org/lists.html for
discussion and questions about OBDFS.  Please contact Peter J. Braam
<braam@stelias.com> or Andreas Dilger <adilger@stelias.com> for more
information.

Andreas
-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
                                                                -- Dogbert

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