I can't speak about RAID, but do you understand that NFS is broken in its
unpatched form? HJ's and many of Trond's changes are **bug fixes**.
Sure, there are people out there using the NFS included in the kernel,
but they are not doing anything serious with it. If they were, they would
have seen and complained about RPC problems, attribute caching problems,
stale file handles, inode revalidation, locking, ... Some groups, like
mine, are locked into an NFS-centric environment: 40 machines, mounting at
least four different remote filesystems, with lots of concurrent access.
The fact that some userland tool needs to be updated when the kernel is
updated seems to me irrelevant, especially when any sane distribution
has a package manager to handle the details. Much more troubling to me
is having to either (1) extract just the bug fixes from the stable patches,
and diverge from the Linus kernel, or (2) manually apply the old NFS etc
patches to the updated kernel and integrate the rejects. That is not to
mention problem of building driver modules distributed outside the
kernel tree with each update.
If you think Linux is the only system with configuration management
problems, just try dealing with Sun's (confusing and frequently broken)
patch clusters.
Bill Rugolsky
rugolsky@ead.dsa.com
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