Keith Devens .com

So GFS (not to be confused with the other GFS, which is not from Google) is very specific. There's no kernel driver for mounting, no offline operation. Lots of things which a real network filesystem would need are missing. Also, all the files in GFS should be a) huge and b) read sequentially if you want things to work right.

I'm afraid that Google isn't going to save the planet on this one.

AGL

The primary problem with NFS is that it uses RPC calls. One based on asyncronous messaging would work a hell of a lot better. Unfortunately, Sun wanted to play around with their new toy (RPC) when they started developing NFS.

RPC calls are async. You fire them off in any order, tagging each with an ID and they come back in any order - with the same id. Maybe you are thinking of some client-side libraries which imposed synchronicity in a probably misguided attempt to hide the fact that the calls were remote at the language level.

And you may call SunRPC a toy. But frankly, all anyone has done since then is reinvent fatter versions of it.

AGL