In the last few weeks, four LINBITers approached me to show me something. In all four cases, it was people not working in development. Two solution architects, one manager, and my contact for security and compliance. And all four presented LINBIT-relevant tools they created using Claude code.
I therefore can’t help but notice the trend of people creating software that helps them in their day-to-day work life by automating something they previously had to do manually. Until recently, it was too costly to assign developers the task of creating that software. However, agentic coding has removed this blocker. People who are not developers by profession can now build tools they envision by themselves.
I have encouraged all my developers to adopt AI into their jobs. Perhaps this has prompted others to become curious to see what they can create with the LLM.
Returning to the subject of the four projects, I support the continuation of all of them. Two of them required a small course correction, as these fresh part-time developers lacked a bigger picture overview. Three of these efforts will become customer visible.
Additionally, I would like to share my opinion on the Co-authored-by: Claude <[email protected]> git footer that Claude Code appends to its commits by default. It is a clever form of advertisement. It has no relevance under copyright, since an LLM can not claim authorship, as it is not a human being or a legal entity. I even consider it harmful, because it might lull the human driving this into a false sense that they can offload the blame to Claude if something was wrong with the commit. By removing that misleading footer, it is obvious to the human author that they will take the blame should there be a bug in that commit. That is the rule for our core projects.
I also want to highlight the performance improvement that comes with the recent drbd-9.3.1 release. An engineer from SIOS, our partner in Japan, worded it this way:
I actually ran a benchmark test using a RAM disk and fio to compare 9.2.7 and 9.3.1, completely eliminating any disk bottlenecks. The results were absolutely amazing! We confirmed a significant increase in throughput (from about 1.4 GB/s to 2.0 GB/s) and a drastic reduction in latency. The performance improvement brought by the new Compound Pages support is truly outstanding. Great job to you and the entire development team!
This is an optimization for large writes, i.e. fio –name=test –filename=/dev/drbd0 –direct=1 –rw=write –bs=1m –size=1000m … The key thing is the bs=1m. Traditionally, DRBD is optimized for small I/O requests. Because that is what Databases do, many small I/O requests. But there are, of course, use cases that do large I/O requests. Linux supports I/O requests from 512 bytes to 1MiB in 512-byte increments.
This optimization improves how DRBD allocates memory for receiving write requests. Before it allocated pages (4096 bytes each) until it had enough to buffer the write request. That means for a 1MiB write request, it did 256 4KiB allocations. With the new code, it now tries to allocate 1MiB in a single kernel call, which takes less time (= performance improvement), and consumes fewer CPU cycles.
The effect becomes more significant when the CPU is slow or when the network and backing block device throughputs are very high. Given that networking is reaching 400Gbps (and 800Gbps is being standardized), and SSDs are becoming faster with each generation, the advancements of these hardware categories underline the importance of DRBD becoming more CPU-efficient.
Moving on to the latest LINBIT content, ‘Backing up or Migrating a Kubernetes Deployment by Using Velero & LINSTOR’ is a new blog entry that continues our recent focus on Kubernetes content. The tutorial in the post describes how to use Velero to back up and restore a Kubernetes cluster namespace deployment, including its persistent storage data, to and from a remote S3 bucket.
Finally, the newly released software updates since I last wrote are WinDRBD 1.2.8, LINSTOR Operator 2.10.5, LINBIT SDS For Windows 1.0.0, and drbd-9.3.1 and drbd-9.2.17, the latter of which I have covered above.
