Forwarding to the ITP because I believe mars is an interesting project
and to keep people in the loop.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: ITP: mars -- Asynchronous Block-Level Storage Replication
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:42:51 +0000
From: Gabriel Francisco <frc.gabr...@gmail.com>
To: Thomas Schöbel-Theuer <tho...@schoebel-theuer.de>, Francesco Paolo
Lovergine <fran...@debian.org>
Hi, thanks for the updates!
Agree, getting mars into mainline will probably take some time,
specially because of the required kernel patches. But I found that mars
module can work fine with the vanilla/debian kernel when compiling it
via dkms.
I tested manually, setting up a small volume and writing lots of stuff
in it while checking the mars file in /proc (it really resembles mysql
replication, yay!). I would like to have some tests running just to give
me more confidence that I will not face any edge case. I'm trying to
have the current test suite running, so far I have a work-in-progress at
https://github.com/fgbreel/mars/tree/wip-dkms-run-test-suite where I'm
setting up two virtual machines, installing the package and running the
tests.
I felt that the existing test suite seems a bit rusty, but I don't mind.
Having *something* to assert that mars dkms works makes me happy :)
I'll check out the link/new test suite you shared and see how it fit the
whole picture. I just landed on a new job, but I'll try to provide an
update soon.
Stay safe,
Gabriel Francisco
On 21/01/2021 19:58, Thomas Schöbel-Theuer wrote:
On 21/01/2021 19:08, Francesco Paolo Lovergine wrote:
Having a single giant patch is not a big issue, of course not nice for
the kernel folks, but fast.
Misunderstanding: my talk about the "jumbo patch" was not about MARS
or kernels, but about the _new_ test suite, written in _bash_ script.
Background: Gabriel had mentioned "the" test suite at github, although
there are 2 different test suites in total, thus I was starting to
explain something about the _new_ test suite.
Probably you don't need any of both test suites for making MARS
availabe to Debian users.
The "old" test suite is in the mars repo you already know, in
subdirectory test_suite/ . It is not developed anymore, because Frank
Liepold left 1&1 in May 2014 (see "git log -- test_suite/" showing his
last commit at his last working day).
You can find an outdated stage of the _new_ test suite at
https://github.com/schoebel/test-suite (which is a _separate_ repo /
project from MARS). My suggestion was to update this repo via a jumbo
patch (saving a lot of work for me).
Getting MARS into kernel upstream is a completely different topic.
Theoretically, it is just a new "driver", and changes practically
_nothing_ at the rest of the kernel. I would be very lucky if it could
be added to the kernel like a jumbo patch, since it adds only a bunch
of new files. I already tried some years ago, but it got stuck.
I will retry once it runs on linux-next again (years ago it did, but
then I had no time for updating it continuously).
Thank you very much,
Thomas
