Summary of issues with MHVTL
The objective is to understand what are all the issues we are facing with MHVLT and start addressing them:
- problem to spawn multiple drive pods each with their own MHVTL
- LTO9 support (RAO) not complete yet
- MHVTL is a kernel-module, which means that it cannot be containerized. This complicates the setup as it is not possible to use any kubernetes cluster; the machines specifically need to have MHVTL installed.
- MHVTL is not meant to be run across multiple machines. Even if we were to install mhvtl on each machine in a cluster, the tapes, drives and libraries are not shared between machines.
- MHVTL is not maintained by us. In the past there have been problems where we had to package our own patched version as waiting for a release took too long.
- We have had some performance issues with MHVTL in the past (see #884). I am not sure to what degree these have been addressed already
- Releases not made frequently enough - issues when trying to compile latest mhVTL tag against Alma 9 - Mark fixed that and cut a new release, but releases are not made regularly. @poliverc added mhVTL compilation as part of CI pipeline in https://gitlab.cern.ch/cta/cta-dependencies in order to improve on this matter. Perhaps we could offer some CI to Mark Harvey or release management since we have more resources.
- ... ?
Edited by Jaroslav Guenther