Pawel Dawidek has been working on GEOM Gate since Aug. of last year, adding incremental features and making requests for testing as required. Earlier this month the code was committed to -current.
FreeBSD: GEOM Gate Committed
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Eugenia Loli
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Ok, this looks elegant. Basically, it seems to be a method for exporting disk devices, (Unlike NFS, which exports filesystems), with some other possible uses.
It’s not an entirely new idea, similar things exist in at least Plan9 and QNX. Like that will keep me from tinkering with it.
They’re also discussing the possibility of exporting everyting in /dev. I can personally see a few uses for that, most of them including /dev/dsp0.0 .
I think I saw someone say that this wil make SCSI-over-IP (iSCSI) much easier to implement, too.
> They’re also discussing the possibility of exporting everyting in /dev.
> I can personally see a few uses for that, most of them including
> /dev/dsp0.0 .
And just think of a pseudo-single system image approach. Take three systems: one with a modem hanging of a serial port; one with a DVD+RW; and one without anything. The last system could act as a client, dialing up on the first and burning a DVD on the second. At the userland level, it easily to logically see all these other systems as just remote devices. Couple these systems with distributed processing, and one can really have some fun!
I can’t wait to play with this! One could make a central client that acts as a netboot server, boot all these other systems, utilize their devices, and manage these resources. While I’m sure there are going to be penalties, especially since I don’t have a 1Gbps network right now, to me this flexibility just seems so darn cool!
Thanks Pawel, phk, and all the other FreeBSD developers!
Jon
More info on GEOM:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=GEOM&sektion=0&manpath=Fre…
Have a look at this blog entry:
http://www.asiatica.org/~ludo/archive/2003/12/Misc%20Stuff_ext2…
Also check out Ext3FS anywhere (supports ext3 despite the name):
http://www.partition-manager.com/n_ext2fs_main.htm
Oops, I meant Ext2FS Anywhere 😉
More one topic, one thing I wanted to do a while ago was share a TV tuner card. But, that was Windows…