Germany's 1&1 Still Working On MARS For The Linux Kernel, Still Hoping For Upstream

At the end of last year was an update on MARS Replication System Still Being Worked On For Upstream Linux Kernel and like clock work, the German web hosting provider has issued another update on the in-development MARS replication system and is still hoping to mainline it, maybe next year.

MARS' tag-line at the 1&1 web hosting company is "replicating petabytes over long distances" and "has replaced DRBD as the backbone of the 1&1 geo-redundancy feature as publicly advertised for 1&1 Shared Hosting Linux (ShaHoLin). MARS is also running on several other 1&1 clusters. Some other people over the world have also seemingly started to use it."

MARS in 2016 saw several bug fixes, portability improvements for newer kernels, some developments around new features, and more. Thomas Schoebel-Theuer who has been leading MARS development at 1&1 is hoping to see more upstream developers willing to engage in the project and ideally work to see it upstreamed. It looks like there's still more work to do, but maybe we'll see this giant code-base land in the Linux kernel in 2017.

Those interested in MARS for storage replication can find out more via the annual status update, this 2016 PDF presentation on the project, or this GitHub repository.