Re: [Ltsp-developer] NBD vs NFS

[David J. <da...@jo...>]

On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 19:47, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> 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.

If I remember correctly, NBD wasn't available when Jim first built
remote swapping into LTSP.  Also, NFS was already working.

NBD-swap sounds interesting; I'll help if I can.

-David