[Ltsp-developer] NBD vs NFS

[Wouter V. <wo...@gr...>]

Hi *,

Something I've been wondering since I found out about LTSP is the
following: why does LTSP use swapping over NFS (which is pretty slow,
considering the overhead of a filesystem) when the Network Block Device
(NBD) was specifically created for this purpose?

If the answer is "We didn't know about NBD" then, well, you do now. I'm
even willing to help out doing the support for NBD, if that help is
wanted and/or needed.

If you did know about it, but chose to go the NFS way for other reasons,
I'd like to know those. Being a disk server protocol rather than a
file-server protocol, NBD is slightly faster as compared to NFS, for
purposes like this. It even is the case that on my m68k-mac, NBD seems
faster[1] than the (poorly supported, under Linux) SCSI harddisk. Which
is amazing, considering the fact that the network here is a 10Base2
coaxial ethernet.

Any specifics?

[1] "Faster" as in "I didn't run any benchmarks, but it sure feels faster"

--=20
wouter at grep dot be

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