having to rebuild my small Manjaro server after a PSU/mainboard failure, I’m thinking of going back to NFS, after having tried both Samba 4 and NFS 4.
However I was not happy with both in terms of performance, esp. parallel I/O, freezing the entire desktop when copying over e.g. video files (observed over the years since Samba v3, behavior was the same in different Linux setups and desktops).
I’ve read about pNFS but it seems to be only available in enterprise storage solutions and quite outdated meanwhile; it’s not clear to me if it is integrated with NFS v4.1 - all current tutorials only tackle plain old NFS - do I really have to install a custom kernel with pNFS support (latest mentioned was 2.6…) or is this already available as a standard package?
ah sorry you’re right, however it’s closely relarted to the tutorial in a way,-)
So does the latest nfs-utils package implement the 4.1 standard? Could not find any concrete information, neither about pNFS, and sadly pNFS support seems not actively maintained anymore across various projects. Also the nfs-utils package docs are quite outdated and still mention SunOS and kernel 2.6 - I’m quite surprised about the lack of modern up to date network filesystems I have to say, or am I missing something?
I’ve found nfs-ganesha while searching the AUR, which seems like a pretty decent implementation, but also there pNFS is mentioned as outdated and not actively maintained by the community.
However, as an interesting aside, it even supports 9P (Plan 9’s network file system protocol), which is even supported on Linux and Mac, any experience here?
So on a related note, what’s my best bet for a performant file server file system which supports parallel transfer of large files, without going enterprise with Lustre, GFS etc.?
NFS is NFS - it is supported in the kernel and as with many nix things they are mature - it is your network and your settings which decides how well it works in specific use cases.
I would say you should look at the ganesha project if a default does not do it for you.
And note
NFS-Ganesha has support infrastructure for pNFS but efforts in this area have not been active for many years and pNFS is not currently supported by the active community.