[TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days?

[Pete Wright]

On 09/29/2017 10:02, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 10:46:16AM -0600, Grant Taylor wrote:
>> I am guessing dhcp and / or bootp, combined with tftp for kernel
>> image, and NFS for root.
>            
> I run linux workstations and a few supercomputers by PXE booting via
> DHCP, serving a kernel and initrd over tftp, then having init download a
> rootfs tarball, which gets extracted to a ramdisk.  switch_root(8) makes
> it easy.  xCAT automates it.

I had a similar setup at a large special effects studio I used to work at.

We were trying solve NFSv3 contention issues - especially with large 
directory tree's creating tons of metadata requests on Linux (issue with 
client side caching IIRC) so we experimented with using UnionFS to allow 
for writes to pass-through to local disk.  It was mostly intermediary 
data and initial testing was promising, in that it alleviated the load 
on our filers and seemed to speed up some rendering processes.

I had left before it made it to wide deployment - but it is something 
I've kept in my toolbox since then as an option.

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA