Evgeniy Polyakov announced the latest release of his Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System, POHMELFS. He noted that the big new feature in this release is strong crypto support, "one can specify [an] encryption method (like cbc(aes), hash or digest, or all of them to be performed on [the] whole data channel (except headers)." In his blog, Evgeniy adds, "Cryptography support is [an] essential addition to the POHMELFS core. It was implemented with performance in mind, so that processing speeds would not drop noticeably even [during] very CPU-hungry operations". He explained, "POHMELFS utilizes [a configurable number of] pools of crypto threads, which perform data crypto processing and submit it either to [the] network or VFS layer." He included results from some performance benchmarks.

Evgeniy describes POHMELFS as "a high performance network filesystem with [a] locally coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed parallel processing of data. [The filesystem] supports [a] strong transaction model with failover recovery, allows encryption/hashing [of the entire] data channel, and performs read load balancing and write to multiple servers in parallel." When asked on his blog when he plans to push the new filesystem for mainline kernel inclusion, Evgeniy noted, "I do not know, maybe its time to push it upstream, but I do not want to bother with Linux kernel politics. We will see soon."

"I regularly run and post various benchmarks comparing POHMELFS, NFS, XFS and Ext4, [the] main goal of POHMELFS at this stage is to be essentially as fast as [the] underlying local filesystem. And it is..." explained Evgeniy Polyakov, suggesting that the POHMELFS networking filesystem performs 10% to 300% faster than NFS, depending on the file operation. In particular, he noted that it still suffers from random reads, an area that he's currently focused on fixing. He summarized the new features found in the latest release:

"Read request (data read, directory listing, lookup requests) balancing between multiple servers; write requests are sent to multiple servers and completed only when all of them send an ack; [the] ability to add and/or remove servers from [the] working set at run-time from userspace; documentation (overall view and protocol commands); rename command; several new mount options to control client behaviour instead of hard coded numbers."

Looking forward, Evgeniy noted that this was likely the last non-bugfix release of the kernel client side implementation, suggesting that the next release would focus on adding server side features, "needed for distributed parallel data processing (like the ability to add new servers via network commands from another server), so most of the work will be devoted to server code."

"This is a high performance network filesystem with a local coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed parallel processing of data," Evgeniy Polyakov said, announcing the latest version of his Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System. He noted that in addition to numerous bugfixes, the latest release includes the following new features:

"Full transaction support for all operations (object creation/removal, data reading and writing); Data and metadata cache coherency support; Transaction timeout based resending, if [a] given transaction did not receive [a] reply after specified timeout, [the] transaction will be resent (possibly to different server); Switched writepage path to ->sendpage() which improved performance and robustness of the writing."

Evgeniy also noted that he has started working on support for parallel data processing, one of the key intended features of the filesystem. He explained that initial logic has been added so data can be written to multiple servers at the same time, and reads can be balanced across the multiple servers, though the logic is not yet being used by the filesystem.

"I'm please to announce [the] POHMEL high performance network filesystem. POHMELFS stands for Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System," began Evgeniy Polyakov, explaining:

"This is a high performance network filesystem with local coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed parallel processing of data. Network filesystem is a client transport. POHMELFS protocol was proven to be superior to NFS in lots (if not all, then it is in a roadmap) operations."

This latest release prompted Jeff Garzik to reply, "this continues to be a neat and interesting project :)" New features include fast transactions, round-robin failover, and near-wire limit performance. This adds to existing features which include a local coherent data and metadata cache, async processing of most events, and a fast and scalable multi threaded user space server. Planned features include a server extension to allow mirroring data across multiple devices, strong authentication, and possible data encryption when transferring data over the network. Evgeniy linked to several benchmarks in his blog.