# NFSv4.1 or pNFS



## aenigmainc (Jul 14, 2014)

*I* was looking to set up a test lab for my ESXi 6.0 lab and *I* wanted to test pNFS.  I was wondering if BSD10 FreeBSD 10 supported that yet, in an NFS server environment?  *I* have seen reference to a pNFS client, but not a server. *I*f it does support pNFS as a server can someone give suggestions on how to set it up? *I*f not can someone point me at a roadmap that may suggest when it might be implemented in FreeBSD?   

*T*hanks for any assistance.


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## Oko (Jul 14, 2014)

aenigmainc said:
			
		

> i was looking to set up a test lab for my ESXi 6.0 lab and *I* wanted to test pNFS.  I was wondering if BSD10 FreeBSD 10 supported that yet, in an NFS server environment?  *I* have seen reference to a pNFS client, but not a server. *I*f it does support pNFS as a server can someone give suggestions on how to set it up? *I*f not can someone point me at a roadmap that may suggest when it might be implemented in FreeBSD?
> 
> *T*hanks for any assistance.


From where I am sitting pNFS is typical Linux vaporware until I see the code. I am not sure how mature NFSv4 is on FreeBSD 10. I am not aware of FreeBSD having support for NFSv4.1. I am running NFSv3 on FreeNAS and NFSv4 RedHat. Both protocols have pros and cons but neither one is a modern, robust, redundant, network aware, distributed file system which 100% fits my needs.


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## SirDice (Jul 14, 2014)

pNFS doesn't really exist, it's part of the NFSv4.1 specification. So it's not a question of using one or the other.


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## usdmatt (Jul 14, 2014)

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/free ... 19384.html

FreeBSD has a NFS 4.1 project but I'm not certain when that will actually be part of a release. pNFS support doesn't look likely any time soon.


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## kpa (Jul 14, 2014)

NFS 4.1 is in head starting from r268115:

http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=268115


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## aenigmainc (Jul 14, 2014)

kpa said:
			
		

> NFS 4.1 is in head starting from r268115:
> 
> http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=268115





*S*o what does that mean? *F*rom my perspective it looks like it*'*s almost ready but *I* know very little about FreeBSD development.


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## SirDice (Jul 14, 2014)

All (new) development is done in HEAD a.k.a. -CURRENT. The commit mentions it will be MFC'ed after a month. MFC is short for Merge From Current and it simply means if no major issues are found the code will be added to -STABLE. It's probably not going to be on time for 9.3-RELEASE but it should find its way into 10.1-RELEASE and 9.4-RELEASE.


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## junovitch@ (Jul 14, 2014)

aenigmainc said:
			
		

> *S*o what does that mean? *F*rom my perspective it looks like it*'*s almost ready but *I* know very little about FreeBSD development.



If you do know enough about development in general, just not FreeBSD specific development, and are willing to learn and debug potential issues, that probably means you can probably grab the latest 11.0-CURRENT snapshot from http://www.freebsd.org/snapshots/ and start playing around in your lab. If you have issues, the mailing lists, not the forums, are the place to go for issues with CURRENT. If you like what you see, then hopefully it does make it into a future RELEASE that you can use in a future production environment.


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## usdmatt (Jul 15, 2014)

Note that as explained in the mailing list message I linked originally, the current NFS4.1 code does not include pNFS. As he mentions, without that 4.1 doesn't really give you anything interesting compared to the current NFS server.

Considering the initial plan seems to be to import a clustered file system, and then implement pNFS on top of that, I can't see stable pNFS support for a while.


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