CONFIG_DST: Distributed storage

General informations

The Linux kernel configuration item CONFIG_DST:

• prompt: Distributed storage
• type: tristate
• depends on: CONFIG_NET && CONFIG_CRYPTO && CONFIG_SYSFS && CONFIG_BLK_DEV
• defined in drivers/staging/dst/Kconfig
• found in Linux kernels: 2.6.30–2.6.32
• modules built: nst

Help text

DST is a network block device storage, which can be used to organize exported storage on the remote nodes into the local block device.

DST works on top of any network media and protocol; it is just a matter of configuration utility to understand the correct addresses. The most common example is TCP over IP, which allows to pass through firewalls and create remote backup storage in a different datacenter. DST requires single port to be enabled on the exporting node and outgoing connections on the local node.

DST works with in-kernel client and server, which improves performance by eliminating unneded data copies and by not depending on the version of the external IO components. It requires userspace configuration utility though.

DST uses transaction model, when each store has to be explicitly acked from the remote node to be considered as successfully written. There may be lots of in-flight transactions. When remote host does not ack the transaction it will be resent predefined number of times with specified timeouts between them. All those parameters are configurable. Transactions are marked as failed after all resends complete unsuccessfully; having long enough resend timeout and/or large number of resends allows not to return error to the higher (FS usually) layer in case of short network problems or remote node outages. In case of network RAID setup this means that storage will not degrade until transactions are marked as failed, and thus will not force checksum recalculation and data rebuild. In case of connection failure DST will try to reconnect to the remote node automatically. DST sends ping commands at idle time to detect if remote node is alive.

Because of transactional model it is possible to use zero-copy sending without worry of data corruption (which in turn could be detected by the strong checksums though).

DST may fully encrypt the data channel in case of untrusted channel and implement strong checksum of the transferred data. It is possible to configure algorithms and crypto keys; they should match on both sides of the network channel. Crypto processing does not introduce noticeble performance overhead, since DST uses configurable pool of threads to perform crypto processing.

DST utilizes memory pool model of all its transaction allocations (it is the only additional allocation on the client) and server allocations (bio pools, while pages are allocated from the slab).

At startup DST performs a simple negotiation with the export node to determine access permissions and size of the exported storage. It can be extended if new parameters should be autonegotiated.

DST carries block IO flags in the protocol, which allows to transparently implement barriers and sync/flush operations. Those flags are used in the export node where IO against the local storage is performed, which means that sync write will be sync on the remote node too, which in turn improves data integrity and improved resistance to errors and data corruption during power outages or storage damages.

Homepage: http://www.ioremap.net/projects/dst Userspace configuration utility and the latest releases: http://www.ioremap.net/archive/dst/

Hardware

LKDDb

Raw data from LKDDb:

• lkddb module nst CONFIG_DST : drivers/staging/dst/Kconfig : "Distributed storage" # in 2.6.30–2.6.32

Sources

This page is automaticly generated with free (libre, open) software lkddb(see lkddb-sources).

The data is retrived from:

• Linux kernel
• Linux Kernel Driver DataBase (LKDDb)

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