Re: [SSI] Need help in getting started

[Brian J. W. <Bri...@co...>]

"Aneesh Kumar K.V" wrote:
>  What  hardware configuration do  you have. I will suggest to go for SSI
> over UML. 

You'll be able to bring up a single node UML cluster with the
instructions and tarball I put out a couple of weeks ago. When you try
to bring up a second UML node, however, things go bad. John Byrne is
trying to figure out what's going wrong. Once he's got it worked out,
I'll release 0.6.1. My SSI Clustering Using UML HOWTO should be ready
about that time, as well.

> If you find any problem and you  hack the cluster_mkinitrd so
> that it will  generate the /linuxrc that will mount root  fs over nfs.

Start by hacking the /linuxrc in a ramdisk generated by
cluster_mkinitrd. You do this by gunzipping it, loopback mounting it,
editing /linuxrc, unmounting, and gzipping it again with the -9
parameter. Once you figure out how hack the /linuxrc script, it's fairly
easy to hack a --nfs=<nfs_server> option into cluster_mkinitrd that
generates your modified initrd.

As I said in previous e-mails, NFS has sloppy coherency guarantees.
Migrating processes can get confused if they see a different version of
an open file (migration is supposed to be transparent to the process).

> If you really want to try some  minimum configuration then you can even
> have it without a shared storage. In that case you have to make sure you
> have both the nodes hardisk in sync.( I run here the last configuration
> ).

Process migration is not terribly useful in this environment, but other
aspects of SSI clustering (e.g., distributed process relationships,
clusterwide fifos, clusterized devfs, etc.) work quite well without a
shared root.

> Is there any chance that we will have CFS in the next release. ?

Version 0.6.1 will have working UML support and Laura's distributed
/proc work. CFS won't be ready for that release.

Pretty soon, I will have the CVS repositories up on SourceForge. Dave
thinks he'll be checking in a limping version of CFS sometime in the
next month, although initially it may just work as a non-root file
system. Once it works okay as a root file system, I'll probably roll the
0.7.0 release.

-- 
Brian Watson                | "Now I don't know, but I been told it's
Linux Kernel Developer      |  hard to run with the weight of gold,
Open SSI Clustering Project |  Other hand I heard it said, it's
Compaq Computer Corp        |  just as hard with the weight of lead."
Los Angeles, CA             |     -Robert Hunter, 1970

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