TrueNAS 13.0 and NFS nconnect - multi-client issue

morganL

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With the release of TrueNAS 13.0, the expectation was that we would inherit the FReeBSD NFS server improvements. One of those was NFS nconnect.

NFS nconnect provides multiple parallel; TCP connections. this parallelism increases single-client bandwidth. This feature is also part of the Linux NFS server and is also available in TrueNAS SCALE.

Now that nconnect is in the releases, we started some comparative performance testing under stressful conditions. The good news is that TrueNAS SCALE did well. The bad news is that there is a stability issue with FreeBSD NFS when using nconnect with multiple clients accessing the same files.

So given this, we can't recommend TrueNAS 13.0 for any serious nconnect deployments. We'll be changing releases notes and blogs accordingly.

The bug-id is here: NAS-116262

We'll be reporting the bug to FreeBSD group and seeing if there is a fix that is reliable. However, we don't expect one quickly.
 

awasb

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No. pNFS is a "layout". It separates the (pNFS) server serving just metadata information from the storage, that gets directly accessed by clients.

nconnect is a mount feature that allows client access from 1 (=traditional behavior) up to 16 (=new max) TCP connections per client.
 
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Could we / how to enable it on the TrueNAS 13.0 server anyways? (If one wishes to do so.)

(Or does it not matter, and it's wholly dependent on the client using the option?)
 

Samuel Tai

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So far as I know, you'll need to manually apply the fix patch to the FreeBSD source and then compile a new NFS server binary to enable it for TrueNAS 13.0-RELEASE.
That's from over a year ago. It wouldn't have made it into upstream by then?

EDIT: If it's projected to be included in FreeBSD 13.1, wouldn't that make it into a TrueNAS Core 13.x release? (For example, Core 13.0-U2 or such)
 
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Samuel Tai

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https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src shows 13.1 only achieved release status 18 days ago. The various patches from the BugZilla do appear to be integrated into this source tree.

On my 13.0-RELEASE system, uname -a shows it's running 13.1-RC6.
 
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Is there any update / remaining concerns now that we have TrueNAS Core 13.0-U1.1 (which runs on FreeBSD 13.1?)
 

morganL

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Is there any update / remaining concerns now that we have TrueNAS Core 13.0-U1.1 (which runs on FreeBSD 13.1?)
It probably works, but its has not yet been thoroughly tested. Feel free to test and report back.
 
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