dtar: support creating archives in NFS
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- Dominant language
- C
- Stars
- 200
- Forks
- 85
- Avg merge
- 3d 21h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 2
Description
Unlike Lustre or GPFS, NFS is not as forgiving when writing a file with multiple processes. At at minimum when writing an archive file on NFS, we need to:
- use an algorithm in which processes align file offsets on memory page boundaries
- and we should use fcntl lock/unlock
After we compute the offset of entry headers (and data), we need to reassign work to processes based on page/block boundary alignment. In fact, different portions of an entry header may need to be written by different processes if it happens to span a page boundary. Also, the work to copy data chunks should be adjusted to align on page boundaries based on their offset within the archive file.
A similar problem exists for dbz2.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by tracing dtar's archive-writing path, especially offset computation, entry-header handling, and data-chunk copying. Study how the work is assigned across processes, then determine how NFS requires page or block alignment and fcntl locking; done means archive creation follows those rules, with the similar dbz2 problem addressed or explicitly scoped.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- c
- Domain
- distributed-systems, operating-systems, performance
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100