[sheepdog] Is sheepdog still actively maintained?

[MORITA Kazutaka]

On Sun, 17 Mar 2019 09:15:52 +0900,
Raymond Burkholder wrote:
> 
> On 2019-03-15 11:29 p.m., MORITA Kazutaka wrote:
> >> Any suggestions on alternatives?  I'd say ceph is a primary one, but sheepdog seemed to be 'lighter weight'.
> > 
> > I'm a bit interested in keeping sheepdog as a tiny implementation of
> > distributed block storage so that we can use it for evaluation purposes.
> > Since we don't have enough resources for maintenance, we
> > have to remove some of the current sheepdog features and make
> > implementation as simple as possible.  For example:
> >   - Remove object cache feature. We can create a block-level cache
> > outside of sheepdog with bcache or dm-cache.
> >   - Remove hyper volume feature. We can create a huge block device on
> > top of sheepdog volumes with LVM.
> >   - Remove object storage feature. It's out of scope of distributed
> > block storage and there is more stable software like OpenStack Swift.
> >   - Remove experimental feature like NFS or Linux block device support.
> > 
> > Any comments would be welcome.
> 
> 
> I would imagine that does mean that you would be keeping the block storage
> which KVM knows how to use?  Which I think was a primary goal? That was my
> primary reason I was giving Sheepdog a try.
> 
> I'm not sure which specific function above to which this relates, but the other
> interesting feature was the shared file storage.  Being able to share files
> between hosts was of value.  But I could see that being removed if a simple
> distributed file system is too complex.

I thought of keeping only a block device interface for KVM, and shared file
storages like NFS was out of scope.

However, it might be better to refine Sheepdog as a tiny library (libsheepdog)
to implement distributed storage system, and provide a sample implementation of
it as a block storage for KVM.  Then, someone has a chance to create a shared
file storage on top of sheepdog.

Thanks,

Kazutaka