Nicolas Williams wrote:
On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 10:26:24PM -0700, Jonathan Loran wrote:
I can envision a highly optimized, pipelined system, where writes and
reads pass through checksum, compression, encryption ASICs, that also
locate data properly on disk. ...
I've argued before that RAID-Z could be implemented in hardware. But I
think that it's all about economics. Software is easier to develop and
patch than hardware, so if we can put together systems with enough
memory, general purpose CPU horsepower, and memory and I/O bandwidth,
all cheaply enough, then that will be better than developing special
purpose hardware for ZFS. Thumper is an example of such a system.
Eventually we may find trends in system design once again favoring
pushing special tasks to the edge. When that happens I'm sure we'll go
there. But right now the trend is to put crypto co-processors and NICs
on the same die as the CPU.
Nico
1) We can put it on the same die also, or at least as a chip set on the
MoBo.
2) Offload engines do have software, stored in firmware. Or maybe such
an offload processor could run software out of a driver, could be booted
in dynamically?
3) You all are aware of how many micro processors are involved in a
normal file server right? There's one at almost every interface, disk
to controller, controller to PCI bridge, PCI bridge to Hyperbus, etc.
Imagine the burden if you did all that in the CPU only? I sometimes
find it amazing computers are as stable as they are, but it's all in the
maturity of the code running in every step of the way, and of course,
good firmware coding practices. Your vanilla SCSI controllers and disk
drives do a lot of very complex but useful processing. We trust these
guys 100%, because the interface is stable, and the code and processors
are mature, well used.
I do agree, pushing ZFS to the edge will come down the road, when it
becomes less dynamic (how boring) and we know more about the bottlenecks.
Jon
--
- _____/ _____/ / - Jonathan Loran - -
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- _____ / _____ / / Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley
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