The next item of business is a stage 1 debate on motion 10795, in the name of Derek Mackay, on land and buildings transaction tax relief from additional amounts Scotland bill. Can I ask any member who wishes to speak in this debate to press their request to sweet buttons now and I call on the finance secretary to speak to and move the motion in his name? Thank you, Presiding Officer. This is part 2 in this afternoon's act, probably far more consensual than the previous subject. It is a shame that Mr Simpson has departed the chamber because he has inspired the BBC to come up with characterisation and images of me coming from Dickens books. I hope that there will be no such conjuring up of more impressions of me in this debate, because that will show what a reasonable person that the finance secretary is. Just short three years ago, the land and building transaction tax came into effect in Scotland, alongside the Scottish landfill tax. The first new national Scottish tax is introduced by the Scottish Parliament in more than 300 years. Subsequently, in 2016 this Parliament approved legislation to introduce the LBTT additional dwelling supplement, a 3 per cent additional rate of tax applied in relation to certain house purchases. The supplement applies where, at the end of the day, that is the effective date of the transaction, a buyer owns more than one dwelling and a buyer is not replacing a main residence. Where the additional amount is paid, the legislation provides that it can be reclaimed when a main residence is being replaced and the sale of the previous main residence occurs within 18 months of the purchase of what then becomes a current main residence. The introduction of the original LBTT legislation and subsequent additional dwelling supplement were important milestones in Scotland's tax journey, but it is important to acknowledge and recognise that there will be, on occasions, a need for change. Taxes, of course, are complex and it is inevitable that amendments will, at times, be required or, indeed, be desirable to improve operation of for other reasons. Reflecting that fact, the Scottish approach to taxation is founded in part on effective engagement and partnership working with stakeholders. It was as a consequence of that engagement, including with MSPs, that introduced secondary legislation last summer to address a specific issue that had been highlighted in relation to the treatment of married couples, civil partners and cohabitants. It referred to as an economic unit in the ADS legislation. The order that was approved by this Parliament in June 2017 addressed the scenario where a couple jointly buy a new main residence, but only one of the couple's names was on the title deeds of their shared previous main residence. Its effects were to ensure that relevant couples either did not have to pay the additional dwelling supplement or could reclaim repayment of the supplement when their previous main residence was sold within the 18-month period. Although the order addressed the issue of transactions occurring after it came into effect, it could not apply to transactions that occurred previously. Members of the Finance and Constitution Committee and stakeholders raised that as a concern during the scrutiny of that order. The Scottish Government agrees with that view and has therefore brought forward this bill to deliver parity for all taxpayers, regardless of the effective date of their transaction. It is single-minded in its focus and scope, serving solely to give retrospective effect to the provisions of the 2017 order. I thank the Finance and Constitution Committee for the scrutiny of the bill and welcome their support for the general principles of the bill. I recognise that stakeholders have raised a number of other issues around the additional dwelling supplement and the approach to devolve taxes more widely. I welcome their input and engagement and take seriously the points that they have raised. I assure you all that, although it is outwith the scope of the bill, those issues raised in the submissions will be considered. However, many of the asks would involve a much more significant amendment to the legislation and will require further attention on the issue of group relief specifically. I intend to bring forward a consultation on draft secondary legislation that is intended to address for future transactions the concerns that stakeholders have raised. That will deliver parity of approach between LBTT and SDLT in this area. Murdo Fraser. I am very grateful to the cabinet secretary for giving way and I welcome what he has just said about group reliefs. I do not know if he is familiar with the law society briefing that has been issued in relation to the stage 1 debate today, but he does in that. A number of other examples of areas where people buying houses together might inadvertently become liable to the additional dwelling supplement. I wonder if the Scottish Government has any plans to look at those areas as well to see whether they are required to be addressed by legislation. I appreciate the intervention. I do not want to give any further views today wider than the purpose of the bill and that is what I have said already. Other than to say that I will reflect on all those submissions and give due consideration to it. I think that there is a very strong argument in the Parliament. Maybe this is an issue that the budget pro-seff review group has assisted us with. Westminster has the ability to refine tax legislation as appropriate. We do not have that function in the Scottish Parliament and I think that there is an increasingly strong case to have such a function to address these kind of things without the legislative route that we otherwise have to go through. I think that that is certainly worthy of consideration. In conclusion, I am taking action on the specific technical issue as a result of that engagement and not least from Murdo Fraser to be fair. The bill is therefore in that context non-contentious and I will hope that it will be supported across the chamber and across the tax community. All other considerations on land and bound transaction tax will be considered in a timely and appropriate manner as part of our overall approach to the planning and management of devolved taxes. I move that the Parliament agrees to the general principles of the land and bound transaction tax relief from additional amount bill and I look forward to this afternoon's debate and I am very curious as to how we will fill the next 40 minutes. Bruce Crawford, on behalf of the Finance and Constitution Committee. How long did I get, Presiding Officer? Five minutes, Presiding Officer. Five minutes. Okay, thanks, Presiding Officer. It is my pleasure to speak as the convener of the Finance and Constitution Committee and I put on record my thanks to my fellow committee members for the constructive manner in which they went about their deliberations on the land and buildings transaction tax relief from additional amount Scotland bill. I also want to thank the clerks, particularly Alan Hunter, who supported the committee so well during our deliberations. If only other aspects of the committee's workload were so straightforward to navigate, on the characters from Dickens, perhaps on this particular occasion Derek Mackay is Samuel Pickwick, who said to have been benevolence personified, entirely a human, incredible and decent and determined. As far as this bill is concerned, perhaps that is the most appropriate character from Dickens. I better now get on with my contribution. By way of background, following the devolution of certain powers over taxation, there is the result of the Scotland Act in 2012, a predecessor committee scrutinised plans to introduce the land and buildings transaction tax from April 2015. As far as the implementation of LBTT, a number of changes have been made to the act, with perhaps the most significant being the introduction of additional dwelling supplement in April 2016. That meant that individuals or couples purchasing a second residential property would be liable to pay an additional tax charge. Exemptions, yes, were put in place to ensure that such buyers were not inadvertently left out of pocket. For example, by legislating to entitle people to claim a refund where they temporarily own two dwellings while waiting for their original property to be sold. However, it became apparent that the legislation had been drafted too tightly. That had the unintended consequence that couples in certain economic circumstances were treated as a single economic unit when determining whether the supplement should be levied, but not when determining whether it should be reimbursed. I know that this is an issue that has been raised with MSPs across the country. To address this anomaly, the Government laid a statutory instrument that the committee considered and endorsed in June last year. At that time, the cabinet secretary confirmed that it was not possible for the secondary legislation to apply retrospectively, meaning that a small number of couples who had already paid the supplement were unable to claim it back. The cabinet secretary undertook to consider other legislative vehicles to affect this change. The bill that we are debating today is the direct result of that undertaking. Although the committee fully supported the policy intentions of a bill that was understandably narrow in scope, a number of additional issues were raised by stakeholders in written evidence. I will briefly address some of those comments and suggestions. A recurring point was that the data that was provided to Revenue Scotland did not allow it to proactively identify taxpayers eligible to claim reimbursement of the supplement. The cabinet secretary acknowledged this and explained that the legal world would be well aware of the bill and would raise awareness among clients. Although Revenue Scotland would also publish information on its website to raise awareness and explain how to go about submitting a claim, however, the cabinet secretary accepted the fair point that attempts should be made to identify eligible taxpayers. The committee therefore invited Revenue Scotland to consider further steps that it will take to identify such people. I am grateful for its considered response, explaining that, although it is not possible to do so, it intends to use a wide range of communication activity to raise awareness of the change. The committee is also mindful of the potential impact on the overall LBTT tax take of refunds arising from the bill. Although the impact is likely to be relatively small, we have invited the Government to provide updates on the number of repayment claims that are made and the amounts that are repaid. I put in record the committee's appreciation of the constructive engagement that we have had with the cabinet secretary and the officials in supporting our scrutiny of the bill. I welcome the comments that the cabinet secretary made in his opening speech and the contents of his letter on 5 March in response to the committee's stage 1 report, as well as his letter today to the committee on issues of group relief consultation announcement, which I think that we would all welcome. The committee recommends the general principles of the bill to the Parliament. Thank you very much. I now call on Murdo Fraser to open for the Conservative Party. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I start by reminding members of my register of interests and that I am a member of the Law Society of Scotland. Following on from the convener, I fear that we might be in for a contest this afternoon to see who can come up with the Dickens figure who the cabinet secretary most corresponds to. I give you, Presiding Officer, Mr McAlber from David Copperfield, who has described us always in debt yet recklessly cheery and blindly optimistic. Beat that, if you can, colleagues. I, on behalf of the Scottish Conservatives, very much welcome the introduction at stage 1 of the lands and buildings transaction tax relief from additional amount of Scotland's bill. The finance secretary knows that I have constituents who were caught in the very circumstances that the bill attempts to redress. Without giving their names, it might be helpful to the chamber if I narrated the circumstances of that case as an illustration of why this legislation is important. In the case of one of my constituents, we had a young couple who had recently married. They lived in a property that the husband had owned prior to the marriage and therefore was in his sole name. The wife did not own any property herself. In time, they decided to move to a larger property that was purchased in their joint names, as would be the normal practice. The entry date for the new property was a few weeks prior to the entry date for the sale of the existing one, so there was a short overlap—nothing unusual in that—and that led to them paying an additional dwelling supplement on the purchase price. If I recall correctly, the sum involved was in the region of £13,000, which represented a very substantial financial commitment. Nevertheless, they fully expected that the sum would be refunded to them after the sale of the first property in the normal way, as they were only second-home owners on a short-term and inadvertent basis. I am sure that members can imagine their horror when they discovered that Revenue Scotland were claiming that the additional dwelling supplement was not repayable in their case. They had never budgeted for an additional £13,000 and had no idea how they would meet that additional charge. The problem was that, as the cabinet secretary has pointed out, the way that the original legislation was drafted, only the husband was treated as replacing a main residence. Because the wife did not have her name on the title deeds of the original property, she was not treated as replacing a main residence, and therefore on the strict interpretation of the legislation, ADS could not be reclaimed on the sale of the first property by the husband. Now, it is quite clear that this was never the policy intent of the original legislation. ADS was introduced essentially as a revenue-raising measure to produce tax from those buying a second or more properties, either for investment purposes or as a holiday home or other residence. It was never intended to be a tax on those simply replacing their main place of living. Yet, due to what is essentially an error in the way in which the original legislation was drafted, couples such as my constituents were inadvertently caught by it. I drew my constituents' case to the finance secretary's attention, and I am sure that other members did in similar cases. I am pleased to see that the Scottish Government acted very swiftly. A statutory instrument was brought in last year to resolve the problem for new purchasers after June 2017. However, primary legislation was required in order to give retrospective effect to those who were caught for the period from the introduction of ADS from 1 April 2016 until the end of June 2017, and hence we have the bill before us. It is a timely and very welcome bill and will be much appreciated by the individuals caught in the situation that I have just outlined. There are two other minor issues that I would like to raise in relation to the bill before us. First, we have to make sure that all those who would benefit from the bill are aware of its passing. This is an issue that I raised with the cabinet secretary when he came to the Finance and Constitution Committee, and indeed the convener has just referred to this in his opening speech. I think that there is a particular case for Revenue Scotland to engage with the Law Society of Scotland, who will be best placed to be aware through their member companies of the cases affected to ensure that everyone is aware that this legislation has been passed and those who need to reclaim ADS are able to do so. The other point relates to separate issues in connection with LBTT, which were raised in evidence to the committee by the Law Society and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland. There are a number of other areas where some adjustments to the LBTT ADS regime would be beneficial, for example in relation to the transfer of investment properties within pension funds or in relation to LBTT group relief, where we are dealing with share pledges. I welcome the fact that the cabinet secretary has published a letter this afternoon indicating that he is prepared to consult on this, and I think that that is something that takes us forward in a very helpful fashion. There has also been a suggestion that an annual finance bill in the Scottish Parliament could be introduced dealing with a minor tidying up of matters such as this, and I think that this is something that the Scottish Government should be considering and would be very welcome. In closing, Presiding Officer, let me just reiterate that the Scottish Conservatives will support the bill before us at stage 1 this evening. I hope that it will become law as quickly as possible, and I know that there are constituents of mine who will be very grateful. There have been a number of heated debates and exchanges over the past couple of months, mainly over the budget between myself and Mr Mackay, but let me make clear at the outset on the debate that I fully support the proposals that have been brought forward in relation to land and building transaction tax, and I commend Mr Mackay for his approach in listening to stakeholders and the issue raised by committee members—principally, Murdo Fraser—and bringing forward some corrective action. It is very welcome. Clearly, the purpose of land and building transaction tax is to lewi a tax on those who are purchasing property. In setting up the original legislation, the approach that was taken was to treat couples, those in civil partnerships and those cohabiting as one domestic unit in order to seek to ensure that people weren't participating in tax avoidance. That seemed to be a reasonable approach. However, as other members have outlined, we have gone into a situation in which, if people were seeking to claim relief for additional dwelling supplement, where they had purchased a property and sold a property in the previous 18 months, they were caught in consistent treatment. That was unfair, and it is against the principles of fair taxation. In addition to the changes that were brought forward by the order last year, the bill addresses those caught in the retrospective nature of this prior to May 2017. That seems to be a reasonable approach. I am encouraged by the fact that it has been well supported by stakeholders who engage in the issue, including the law society and those who participate in the relevant forum. In terms of the financial impact, the financial memorandum states that it will have an impact of between £655,000 and £1.55 million. Although that is relatively small, in terms of the overall budget, it will have an impact on the budget, and it will be interesting to understand from the Cabinet Secretary where that will be drawn from. I think that some of the responses that have been made in relation to the consultation on the take-forward of other issues in terms of how we could, as a Parliament, better manage taxation. It is right to look at the fact that, particularly as we now have increased tax powers, we may get more of the technical issues that will come up that require tidying up. The idea of an annual tax bill seems to be a reasonable one to look at, where we can make sure that we tidy up any unintended consequences. That is a necessary measure today. I commend the work that has been done by the Finance, Committee members, witnesses and clerks. I commend the Cabinet Secretary for Appropriate Legislation to correct the loophole and ensure that those who have been caught unfairly by the way in which the original legislation was drafted can now seek appropriate redress. I move to the open debate, and I call Willie Coffey to be filled by Bill Bowman. The title of the bill may well prove to be almost as long as the time taken to consider and approve it the land and buildings transaction tax relief from additional amount to Scotland bill, as the cabinet secretary, convener and members of reminders, seeks to correct an unintended consequence of the original bill when it was introduced. The LBTT tax came in in 2015, replacing stamp duty land tax in Scotland, and it means that a percentage of the value of a house is payable in tax, and that percentage varies depending on the value of the house. The additional dwelling supplement, or ADS, came in in 2016, and its purpose was to charge an additional 3 per cent of the value of the house if it is a second home. The intention was that ADS would apply if one spouse owned an existing home and the other spouse bought a second home, but it was not to apply if the buyer was replacing the original house. The unintended consequence here, of course, was that the ADS was still being charged to certain couples who bought another house replacing the original house, because only one of their names was on the title of the first house. That was not the policy intention behind the ADS tax, and it is greatly important that, as a Parliament, we listen to how the well-meaning action we can take be improved and act accordingly. The bill simply seeks to correct that and allow a retrospective claim to be made for the return of that ADS tax in those cases, so we require a new bill to correct the problem. The financial memorandum accompanying the short bill estimates that there is likely to be an increase of somewhere between 2 per cent and 5 per cent of joint buyers indicating an intention to claim the tax back, provided that they are able to dispose of their original property within 18 months. On average, the value of each ADS transaction is thought to be around £8,000 or so. Overall, the cost is estimated, as James Kelly pointed out just a moment ago, to be somewhere between £600,000 and £1.5 million and, as I understand it, to be met within existing resources. It will not involve a huge impact on the costs in the Scottish budget but a very welcome measure, no doubt, for those people affected by it. On the overall impact of the LBTT tax and its performance, we are seeing that over 90 per cent of home buyers pay less tax or no tax at all compared with the predecessor stamp duty tax. It has helped to keep over 25,000 houses out of tax altogether by setting a threshold of £145,000, which means that there is no charge until that figure is reached. We ought to welcome the progress that is made through the LBTT as it involves home buyers paying a fairer amount of tax and gives them a helping hand in saving money in this regard. At the upper end of the market, data from Revenue Scotland tells us that house sales are continuing to rise annually by about 18 per cent. The Scottish Government is committed to monitoring the performance of the tax across all the bans. I note from the cabinet secretary's announcement that the Government intends to consult on group relief, an issue that was raised by quite a number of the stakeholders involved. In summary, the bill is a welcome correction to an unforeseen effect that unintentionally but unfairly taxed some house purchases, and I am pleased to support the motion from the Scottish Government to address that and allow those house buyers to reclaim the tax that they paid and the purchase of their house. Thank you very much. I call Bill Bowman to be followed by Neil Bibby. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I refer members to my register of interests with respect to my membership of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. I will warn also that there will be some repetition of what others have said in my speech. I thank the cabinet secretary for bringing the bill forward. It is both welcome and necessary. It was an anomaly in the additional dwelling supplement that saw it chargeable when spouses, civil partners and cohabitants jointly replaced a home owned by just one of them. It is right now that we apply last year's action to end that anomaly retroactively. I also want to echo Murdo Fraser's point regarding advertising this change. I appreciate that Revenue Scotland cannot identify those affected and will advertise the change on their website as discussed. That does not seem wholly sufficient, no, and I wonder if at some point the cabinet secretary can clarify whether any third parties such as professional bodies or estate agencies have been contacted about notifying the public more of this change. As welcome as this latest fix is, it only scratches the surface. The Law Society of Scotland have highlighted several additional anomalies with ADS in their submission to the finance committee. One of those additional anomalies regards couples who are separating. When one partner goes on to buy a new home, relief is not available. Equally, there is no relief for couples who were not previously living together prior to purchasing a joint property. Now, neither situation seems fair and those caught up in such cases might feel they are being penalised for circumstances that may be outside their control. Neither is it fair that the SNP's land and buildings transaction tax contains no dependent dwelling exemption, as stamp duty land tax does for buyers in the rest of the UK. It is more than reasonable to consider that purchasing a property with another connected to it should be considered as an overall single transaction rather than as a purchase of an additional residence. However, we should not address those issues in isolation. The bill is welcome, but it is narrow and cumbersome, representing a lot of time and effort in ending one relatively small but significant anomaly in a specific aspect of one particular tax. A case of deficient SNP legislation leading to a deficient fix leading to yet another fix, a new approach is needed. Perhaps the cabinet secretary alluded to that in his speech. Is it not fair to reflect that Parliament is a whole past this legislation, and the right thing for government to do is engage with parliamentarians and stakeholders in where possible to remedy any issues that require to be remedied? To take any other course of action would have meant that there was not recourse and a satisfactory resolution for those that have been caught up by this, which is not necessarily a matter of parliamentary fault, arguably legal interpretation or enforcement, whatever it happens to be, surely Parliament is doing the right thing this afternoon. Thank you for that intervention. Parliament is doing the right thing, but it is a method of dealing with doing the right thing that I am going to come on to here and ask about. Revenue Scotland could play a more prominent role in raising administrative policy changes, mirroring the relationship between HM Treasury and HMRC. As mentioned, the establishment of an annual finance bill would allow this Parliament a formal opportunity to review and revise tax policy, a position backed by respected bodies such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, the Chartered Institute of Taxation, the Scottish Property Federation and the Law Society of Scotland. Surely the finance secretary would prefer his legacy to be that of reforming finance secretary when the time comes for a legacy. The very issue that we debate today demonstrates the need for a formalised review process. As the Scottish Property Federation noted, there was a very little opportunity for detailed scrutiny of additional darling supplement legislation. Perhaps a timely reminder for the SNP of the dangers of rushing legislation through this Parliament only for it to come back and hit them later. An annual finance bill would signal that this Parliament is serious about using its evolving tax powers in a considered and fair manner. The Parliament is maturing, its approach to tax policy must mature too, so let me finish to say that when we take decisions on how much of people's hard-earned money to collect from them and how to spend it for them also, they must have confidence in our decisions. The public, we serve, deserve no less, thank you. I wish to record my support for this bill and I will repeat what Bill Bowman said about repeating others and the likelihood of that in my speech as well. The cabinet secretary and others have set out the details of what the bill will achieve. It is, of course, unusual to introduce and pass its respective legislation, but in this case it is absolutely the right thing to do. It corrects an anomaly and an unintended unfairness introduced by the Land and Building Transaction Tax Act 2020. At the time, the intention of the Scottish Government was clear that it wanted to levy an additional tax on those who purchased a property in Scotland and who already owned another property. Rightly, the Scottish Government recognised that, often in the purchase of a property, a situation can arise where an individual or a couple for a short period become owners of two properties. That is why, as has been said, a period of grace of up to 18 months was introduced, whereby if the person, a couple purchasing a second property, then disposed of their first property, they were able to reclaim the additional amount of LBTT that had been paid. However, it has become clear, as has been said, that in trying to ensure that married couples, civil partners and cohabitants do not move property between individuals for tax-avoidant purposes, the anomaly or unintended consequence to which I previously referred has been created. The Parliament has legislated for a situation in which spouses, civil partners and cohabitants are liable, as would a single purchaser be for the additional taxation when jointly buying a home to replace a home that was owned by only one of them. As has been said by members, they were subject to the additional dwelling supplement, if only one name was listed on the deeds. Unlike a single person or a couple who were both listed as owners of the original property, those who were not listed as owners of the original property but were listed as joint owners of the new property, not only became liable for the additional tax but, unfairly, cannot reclaim that tax if the original property is disposed of within 18 months. It is only fair to not just address that anomaly but for all future purchases but to compensate those who have been unfairly charged since the ADS was introduced. Everyone accepts that the easiest way to address such anomalies is by the use of secondary legislation. Unfortunately, retrospective legislation cannot be affected by secondary legislation unless there is a specific express power, which in this case does not exist. Hence the bill, which has cross-party support and the support of key stakeholders. While I support this bill, I also want to highlight some of the wider concerns that are addressed to the committee by those key stakeholders. As we have heard, the Law Society of Scotland has highlighted this bill and will not address other changes to LBTT, which they believe are urgently required. I accept that there is no opportunity to do this here but I hope that the cabinet secretary will reflect on what the Law Society has said and that he will come back to Parliament with suggestions about how that can be looked at in the future. I referred earlier to anomalies and unintended consequences. It is therefore worth reflecting also on another relevant issue raised by the Chartered Institute of Taxation, the Law Society, the Scottish Property Federation and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland, that there should be a way of addressing technical issues that occur in our new devolved tax system. As James Kelly and others have said, the idea of an annual Scottish finance or tax bill is a good one. Again, I would ask the cabinet secretary for commitment that the Scottish Government will fully consider that. If the Parliament decides that retrospective legislation is needed to address the anomaly, it would be pointless if the intended beneficiaries of that legislative change are unaware of the entitlement to claim a refund and accept arguments against engaging an expensive publicity exercise on that. However, I hope that Revenue Scotland can bring forward detailed proposals about how those affected will be identified and notified, as has been said as well. The legal world and the Law Society have an important role to play here. Two of those involved will inevitably have instructed a solicitor. I suggest that the Law Society be encouraged to encourage its members to identify clients through fit their relevant profile in the identified time period and to contact those clients to make them aware that there has been a change that could bring benefit to them. While that is an unusual bill, it proposes to have retrospective impact that is straightforward, has unanimous support and will address a small but significant unfairness, and therefore support the committee's recommendations that the Scottish Governments will not be supported. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Before I start, I would like to draw members to my register of interests with respect to rental of property. I will keep it very short and give you some time back at the risk of repeating what everyone has said up to now and what has been an extremely consensual debate. It makes a welcome change, a bit of a respite, from the usual debates in this place involving matters financial and constitutional that are more akin to multidimensional trench warfare. It is nice this afternoon to get what is the equivalent of, perhaps, a bit of a break to go and play football in the snow before hostilities resume again tomorrow with the debate and the committee on the continuity bill. I turn to the bill itself. Obviously, it tidies up in anomaly with respect to retrospective relief. The original legislation about additional dwelling supplement provided that couples would be treated as one economic unit to avoid the potential for tax avoidance with individuals moving property between themselves. It clearly did that, but it created a specific anomaly whereby if the old property was in the name of one of the individuals and the new property was in both names, it fell liable for the tax. Effectively, treating them as one economic unit where ADS was payable but not when the ADS was being repaid. It is welcome to see that the Government has listened to the concerns that have been raised in the cabinet secretary's bill to address that anomaly. The total tax reclaim, which has been mentioned by Mr Kelly, comes to somewhere. Estimates vary between £650,000 and £1.5 million approximately, which clearly is not a significant number in the scope of the Government's finances. However, as Mr Fraser mentioned, if individuals are concerned, that could be a significant amount of money, and they will be very glad to see that coming back to them. Clearly, other issues have been raised through the scope of the consideration of the bill. As has been mentioned, it is good to see that group relief is having consideration by the cabinet secretary with the opening of a consultation on that matter, and other anomalies raised by the Law Society will hopefully get some review as well. Bruce Crawford I wonder whether the member agrees with me in regard to an annual finance or tax bill that perhaps Bill Bowman should go off and read the budget process review group, which covered the area quite extensively. In fact, it was recommended to the Government that it examined, indeed, the finance bill, and it brings forward any recommendation by the end of the current session. Indeed, the cabinet secretary responded quite positively to that suggestion. Ivan McKee That was exactly the next point on my list of points here. I think that the finance bill would be something that would be very welcome to be considered, and let's see if that is something that is possible. It is a shame that Mr Bowman did not get the memo about the suspension of hostilities with his remarks earlier. In conclusion, I would like to say that it is great to see the Government listen to this issue, to take it on board and to bring forward the required changes to make that effective. The committee, the Finance and Constitution Committee and its entirety welcomes the bill. There is consensual support for it, and I am glad to see the bill passed in due course. James Kelly Bill Bowman and Neil Bibby both commented that Ivan McKee was concerned that they might be repeating some of the points that others have made. I feel about sympathy for those of us who have not spoken twice in this debate. It is a real danger that we could be appearing on UK Goldstone. Obviously, there has been a strong element of consensus in this debate, which is right, because the anomaly in the original legislation is being corrected by the legislation that has been brought forward by the cabinet secretary and those who have been unfairly affected. That goes through. We will be able to claim appropriate retrospective relief. In terms of some of the issues that have come up, people have raised the issues brought up in other responses from the law society and other organisations. I am looking to try and extend out the areas that are covered by the legislation in terms of group relief. Bill Bowman gave the example of couples that have been separated. That should be looked at seriously. However, I would give an element of caution. Ultimately, this is a tax-raising measure, and taxes have to be raised fairly. If there are unfairnesses in the system, I expect those to be ironed out. However, we do not want to get into a situation in which we build on so many exemptions that we lose the effectiveness of the tax-raising measure, which is ultimately to contribute towards the budget that everyone feels so strongly about no matter what their point of view on it is. In terms of the awareness campaign, that is something that Murdo Fraser raised at the committee. I appreciate that it is potentially difficult, because looking at the analysis, it potentially only affects between 76 and 189 people. It is quite a small number, so I can understand the caution from the cabinet secretary in terms of Revenue Scotland or anyone else launching a major advertising campaign. I suppose what needs to be done is some innovation there, in that a lot of these bodies will know the particular individuals who may be affected by this and can communicate to them. I think also social media could be used quite skillfully. Those of us who use it as part of our political campaigning are well aware that if you look at Facebook, you can put a small money behind Facebook advertising and that can reach a wide audience. That might potentially be something for Revenue Scotland to look at. The other main point that came out at the debate that I raised in my original contribution, Neil Bibby, underlined that it was perhaps a need for an annual finance bill to deal with technical tax changes. I think that that makes good sense. Overall, it has been a consensual end to the afternoon, if it was not a consensual start to the afternoon. Certainly, from those benches, we support the Government's approach in that. Thank you very much. I call Alexander Burnett to wind up for the Conservative Party. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I would firstly like to extend my thanks to my fellow committee members for the constructive conversations that we have had on the bill and look forward to continuing our work with them as we scrutinise this piece of legislation. In addition, I would like to echo the thanks of our convener. We have been extended to our clerks and to those who have submitted evidence to the Finance and Constitution Committee. Before I continue, I would like to note members to my register of interests, particularly the businesses that I own, which deal with the purchasing and leasing of residential properties and businesses and are impacted by LBTT. Turning to the bill itself, the Scottish Conservatives agree with and welcome its introduction at stage 1. As many have pointed out today, the need for this bill is that it is the consequence and another example of an SNP Government pushing through bad legislation, requiring further legislation to correct. The irony of that, as we argue over the timings proposed by the SNP for the continuity bill, makes it particularly topical. It would appear from evidence taken that this will not be the last piece of correcting legislation that is required. As my colleague Murdo Fraser noted, this legislation is required to correct the injustice brought on many constituents who are simply starting a home together. As has been pointed out, many experts noted during discussions over previous legislation that they had grave concerns over the impact of a bill on the housing market and other potential consequences. Those concerns have been borne out by facts. The estate agent Aberdeen Considine's own analysis last December, which showed that selling prices in Glasgow's east end had risen by 20 per cent in the last quarter. As the times reported just last Friday, it has led to first-time buyers without the extra capital being consistently outbid by buy-to-let investors from China and the Middle East. Whilst not wanting to deter international investment, legislation brought in by this Scottish Government should not be to the detriment of its own residents looking to make a life and home of their own. However, the bill also brings forward the opportunity to consider the wider issues that we face with LBTT. The Law Society noted that there will continue to be regular issues that arise in relation to the implementation of devolved taxes and that they would encourage Revenue Scotland and the Scottish Government to work together in a policy partnership to ensure that the Scottish tax system is responsive and fit for purpose as it develops. It is stated by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland that there is a good case to be made for care and maintenance measures in the existing tax law, so that if stakeholders find parts of the legislation that do not work is intended, there is an opportunity to revisit the law without the need for primary legislation. I note and welcome the cabinet secretary's letter to the committee shortly before the debate, introducing a consultation on group reliefs and hope that he will continue to be as receptive to other issues. In conclusion, we have a duty to pass bills here but work effectively and benefit our constituents to the maximum effect, the first time round. Whilst we support the consensus in passing this bill to the next stage, I would ask the cabinet secretary to cover in his closing remarks what his response is to the further amendments to the land and buildings transaction tax legislation that the law society and others have raised. I call on the cabinet secretary of finance to conclude the debate. Thank you very much. I will do so briefly by answering a number of points that have been raised. In terms of finance, I imagine within all the devolved taxes that the scale of the financial issue here is not of a scale that would give me any cause for concern, but, although Revenue Scotland cannot proactively pursue those who they think might be eligible for that refund, in a sense, the raising awareness of the issue and the solicitors and others, they can proactively go back to their clients and hopefully will provide redress to people. I suppose that Murdo Fraser, like many MSPs, will enjoy writing a letter to constituents to say, see that £13,000 bill that you were taxed with? Well, because of the consensus in Parliament, you are now no longer liable for that and can reclaim that back. What a dream for a Tory to write such a letter, but in fact any member who has had such a case raised can write back in those terms, so MSPs have a responsibility as well. In all seriousness, I appreciate the tone of the debate, the constructive suggestions and supporting the action that will be taken to ensure that we can address that issue. Having addressed it through the order, we can also address it retrospectively as well. I do not often hear the words from James Kelly that I commend Derek Mackay, but I liked it and hope that we can hear more of that in future. On that note, more than just this issue, if there is indeed parliamentary consensus that what we require is an annual finance bill to address some of the month-to-month, year-to-year finance issues, I think that that will be welcome. However, the finance committee convener is absolutely right. Bruce Crawford was absolutely right, but it was a recommendation coming from the budget process review group and something that I certainly welcome. However, it is a further welcome that parties across the chamber agreed on that point, including the mild-mannered Bill Bowman. In reference to some of the specific issues raised around why it does not capture every issue that is raised through the consultation, we also want to be very careful around tax avoidance and some deliberate behaviours to avoid paying tax. In whatever we do, yes, we engage, yes, we consult, but there was a clear reason to proceed with this bill and this very focused piece of legislation to address that anomaly. I think that the Parliament gave it due attention at the time, but sometimes there will be unforeseen consequences from legislation and its interpretation and enactment, and Parliament, of course, should have the right to return to that and address that. Also, all-position parties being mature enough to welcome the remedies when they have been found and found so swiftly and in a fashion of consensus and constructive approach. Again, from the committee, from stakeholders, I appreciate the response on this. Of course, we will return to the other matters that have been raised through the course of the consultation. The financial consequences have been set out. The number of people affected is quite small but significant for those people, and that is why we remedy that today. I look forward to doing so in just a few seconds' time. This is only stage 1. I look forward to the further stages of this debate and the recommendation of cross-party appeal to have yet another finance debate in the Scottish Parliament following on from the budget debates that we have had over the course of the past few months, but I am happy to move the bill this afternoon. That concludes our stage 1 debate. The next item of business is consideration of motion 10654, in the name of the cabinet secretary, on a financial resolution for the land and buildings transaction tax relief from additional amount to Scotland Bill. I call on Derek Mackay to move that motion. The next item is consideration of business motion 10843, in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, on behalf of the bureau setting out a revised business programme. I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion 10843. The next item of business is consideration of parliamentary bureau motion 10844, on stage 2 proceedings on the UK withdrawal from the European Union legal continuity Scotland Bill. I ask Joe Fitzpatrick on behalf of the bureau to move the motion. We come now to decision time. The first question is that motion 10794, in the name of Derek Mackay, on the local government finance Scotland order 2018, be agreed. Are we all agreed? We are not agreed. We will move to vote. Members may cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion 10794, in the name of Derek Mackay, is yes, 93, no, 23. There were no abstentions. The motion is therefore agreed. The next question is that motion 10795, in the name of Derek Mackay, on the land and buildings transaction tax relief from additional amount Scotland bill at stage 1 be agreed. Are we all agreed? The next question is that motion 10654, in the name of Derek Mackay, on a financial resolution for the LBTT relief from additional amount Scotland bill be agreed. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The final question is that motion 10844, in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, on stage 2 of the UK withdrawal from the European Union legal continuity Scotland bill be agreed. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. That concludes decision time. We will move to members' business, in the name of Mary Gougeon, on the leader programme. We will just take a few moments from members and ministers to change their seats.


Welcome to another edition of RCE. I'm your host Brock Palin and again I have Jeff Squire some Cisco systems and the open MPI project Jeff. I hope you had a good holiday weekend Hey, Brock. Yep sure did and certainly can tell that your microphone is on the fritz We're gonna have to apologize to our listeners in advance today that you you're using your laptop mic instead of your regular one Yes, I'm having strange USB issues where I cannot get my good microphone to work. So I'm on my backup We have today Peter Honeyman and Bruce Fields both from the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology integration better known as city. I should point out Michigan is my alma mater So I've actually kind of been familiar with city for a while. So Peter Bruce. Welcome to the show Yeah, hi. Thanks a lot How about you guys introduce yourself and say your names people to connect and give a little background Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm Peter Honeyman I'm a research professor of computer science at the University of Michigan and I've been here for a long long time measured in decades All of the time I've spent at Michigan. I've been at city as more or less the staff scientist And At this point I kind of run the place So that's my gig And I'm Bruce Fields and I'm an assistant research scientist at city. I came to Michigan to study mathematics but after getting a getting a doctorate in 2000 came to city and since then I've been working on a Linux and NFS and I maintain the Linux kernels NFS server Okay, so we're here to talk about the NFS v4 effort specifically but for anybody who might not know Can you give us a quick description of? What NFS is and then get on to What NFS v4 brings verse v3? Yeah, sure So NFS stands for network file system Most people are familiar with NFS. It has been a standard component of all Unix and Unix like operating systems Since the early 80s It was developed by Sun Microsystems. Well, it was kind of developed by Bill Joy when he was at when he was still a grad student at Berkeley, but it was really matured at at Sun and became Universal among Unix Unix based operating systems because it was An open system in the sense that Sun published the protocol for NFS and allowed All of the other vendors to do their own implementations So NFS really was one of the very first open systems Around in fact Sun went beyond just publishing the the specs for the protocol, but they made Open source implementations available. Well, they were nearly open sourced. They were quite freely available To universities NFS is a protocol More than more than anything else I mean people think of it as a file system, but really it's a protocol a client server based protocol that allows Servers to distribute files to to multiple clients within, you know, a strict Unix like namespace it Supports the POSIX interface and looks in every way to a client like, you know, a regular local file system Except when the network screws up. Anyway NFS was designed in a time When you know local networks prevailed when networks had lower bandwidth then then it's available today and latency Rarely became much of an issue because everything was was done on the local level It was also designed in an environment. It was really designed before that, you know, the explosion of the internet Which I guess dates to like 1990 or the early 90s So security was was less of an issue for for for NFS. It started out as version two No one really knows that what happened to version one. I mean, maybe it's like, you know, Oracle It wanted to sound mature. So they started at version two There was a some some small changes were made to it along the way in the 90s to improve its ability to cash files and to improve performance but NFS seemed to be stuck at version three for a long long time and there was some some some problems with version three That made it made it difficult to extend it to scale it out to an internet scale with the scale of the number of users on the internet as well as the the the latencies That that are common on the internet It was mostly Implemented as a UDP based protocol and that's just not going to cut it on internet scale But because it was a protocol that belonged to Sun Microsystems It was difficult to to push it forward Sun had the incentive but couldn't really develop the consensus Other folks that were involved in NFS development had the consensus, but they didn't really have the Incentive to improve what was you know, essentially something that was owned lock stock and bail by their competitor so Sun actually in a very mature way found a way out of this problem by dedicating the protocol to the internet engineering task force, which is where internet protocols are born and the IETF formed a working group to Develop the next version of NFS that that's where NFS v4 came from by about 1999 or 2000 that It was pretty well understood what NFS v4 would look like and how it would be different from From from earlier versions and that's kind of when city got involved when some of the some of the vendors Sun Microsystems network appliance were looking to promote this the new standard or that you know the incipient standard by commissioning city to build the The Linux based open-source reference implementation of NFS v4 In that way there could be multiple independent Implementations from from a common specification, which if shown to interoperate would satisfy the IETF's requirements for for for new standards So that's kind of the early history v3 and v4 Okay, so what are some of the advantages of v4 over v3? Sounds like v3 actually while I had some performance improvements over v2 really didn't have anything to address the scale like our focus here on RCE tends to be high-performance computing people running large compute clusters or clouds or similar kinds of Applications maybe with thousands of clients NFS has never really been something that's been described to go on thousands of clients. Is this something being addressed with v4? Yeah, that's some of the some of the later work that that we're doing Let me tell you a little bit about v4 and and how it is different from v3 First of all some of the problems of v3 were addressed With you know essentially with a hammer security in in in NFS v4 is mandatory and v4 is required to support Kerberos based Security mechanism as well as a public key based security mechanism This requires some changes To the remote procedure call mechanism that's used by NFS. There's a an internet standard called GSS generic security services And by melding The RPC and GSS you get this RPC sec GSS Which is the the remote procedure called package with the GSS? security mechanism Layed in as as one of the you know as one of the security mechanisms for the RPC now I Kind of think that actually that could be done with v3. I mean that could have been done with 3-3. Don't you think Bruce? No, it has been I mean yeah v3 supports all v3 implementations modern ones at this point support RPC sec GSS as well but it was partly the v4 Implementation effort that actually made that happen Yeah, so So it so so it gave it gave the right push At that point. I mean NFS security prior to RPC sec GSS was pretty much you just kind of throw your user ID on the wire, you know Oh, I'm 101 and the server believes you so it was a you know a trivial exercise for undergraduates Throughout the in the late 80s and throughout the 90s to build little shells that could you know wander around through NFS space and pretty much You know lie about their identity and and access Files file servers Anywhere okay, so that was kind of it, you know security was was really kind of a joke That's now fixed the that mechanism that kind of security mechanism is Optional now in in NFS v4, but it's required that it support the stronger security mechanisms. That's one major change a second major change is UDP is pretty much prohibited in In NFS v4 mean the language of the spec doesn't come out and say it what it says is that the transport layer is required to support, you know some some some features that More or less say yeah, it's got to run on TCP so compliant NFS v4 implementation is must run on TCP and that solves a lot of the the long-haul problems the wide area problems that that NFS v3 had which you know based on UDP It had all the retransmission issues that that arise with with with UDP And the you know fragmentation and and you know all the other ugliness More or less the reason why we abandoned UDP for for most purposes Let me think what else does people have well another historical okay? No, I'm sorry as a networking guy. I just I'm a little curious what kind of features are required That require TCP but sides, you know Built-in retransmits and things for like that for long haul. What oh my obvious questions, you know jump to like all right Well, UDP was great for scalability But you lose at least a little bit of that with TCP because it consumes a bit more resources and things like that Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I don't think that UDP was great for scalability Unless you unless what you mean is It didn't require any cycles Which I don't think of as being a scalability issue the You know, I can't quote you the actual language of RFC 3530, but what is it? It requires control and The word reliable is in there. Yeah, so yeah, so Yeah, reliable flow controlled. I don't think it requires sequencing But you know if you want if you need reliable flow controlled you And you want to do that with UDP then you pretty much have to build up the entire TCP of infrastructure around UDP Which is more or less what was done in v3 you know With the in the in the RPC level but that's a messy place to do it and it It leaves you with an implementation that kind of doesn't advance with TCP, you know And TCP advances everything that runs on TCP gets the advantage of it Anyway Yes, that's that's answering your question about UDP And I think Bruce was gonna say a little bit more about some of the advantages of v4 some of the differences Well as historical annoyance with v3 has to do with the way it developed Which was when when a new feature need was needed It was often added by adding another protocol on the side to implement that feature So for example when people wanted File locking What what they did was to create another a separate file locking protocol So there's a separate protocol for file locking there's also a separate protocol for ACLs There's another one that's used by the initial mount program to get the root file handle And this becomes somewhat of a nightmare again for the especially for the long haul If you need to traverse any firewalls So one change in v4 is that all of the functionality is put into one single protocol it was also a real problem because While while vendors paid very close attention to NFS interoperability lock D Interoperability was less, you know less assured so that Became the case that if you if you thought you might be working in in a multi-vendor environment Then you couldn't rely on the existence of a locking protocol, you know that that that worked across all vendors So yeah, so locking is now built-in. So that tells you something real important right there about v4 as opposed to v3 v3 is is known as a stateless protocol in the sense that the server doesn't maintain State on behalf of the client every request has all of the information in it That's that's needed to service the request v4 is extremely stateful the server keeps a lot of state on behalf of each client And and you know that I mean that's a mixed bag there that that affects the reboot and recovery mechanisms for for v4, but it also You know it frees the the the client server protocol from from You know having to have on the one hand this kind of arid environment in which you can't really do much. You can't have locks You you can't Negotiate Special features of the connection for a specific client At the same time the open call in in NFS v4 I mean NFS v3 didn't even have an open call v4 has this open call that is really pretty expensive to run and it requires a lot of negotiation between the client and server To to pick out all of the the options that that they want to you know to control that could their connection but AFS proved long ago that having a stateful Server Can have real performance benefits in terms of scalability now when I talk about scalability. I'm talking about You know how many clients can a server can hook up to a server without washing that server out or Can we scale to long haul or to you know to high speed or low speed scale up scale down Having both you know a Reliable and robust transport and a stateful server Allows You know it's kind of a funny thing because what AFS proved is that With with with with the server maintaining state on behalf of the client The clients could be expected to do a lot more of the work And that's why AFS has better scaling properties than NFS v3 You know back in the day when AFS was was being developed You could you could go up to maybe a couple of dozen clients per server with NFS and AFS was shooting for a thousand clients per server They did that with the you know the strong caching On on the clients, but you can't do client caching You can't do you know consistent client caching without the server getting involved and you know keeping track of what you know What's in each client cache? NFS Still doesn't really have That kind of you know robust and reliable Mechanism for client caching but one thing that v4 does have is a mechanism called delegation Which kind of came out of the windows world What it what it comes down to is if if a client is the only client with an interest in a file Then the server Can delegate all of the operations on that file to that client mostly what we're talking about is is stateful operations like locking So if I'm a client and you know, I I start accessing a file And the server Delegates the file to me grant grants me a delegation on the file then I can Run locks and and stuff like that on the file and it becomes local operations I use my local lock manager, and I don't have to talk to the to the servers lock manager at all now Obviously if two clients want to want to use the same file if there is in fact concurrent sharing Then the delegations have to be revoked which is very similar to an AFS callback operation and then subsequent locking takes place on the server with the servers lock manager and things get a little bit slower as They have to when you you know when you have to negotiate moderate this kind of concurrent sharing So that's another feature that that That's in there. It also has as Bruce mentioned ACLs built in and the ACLs These are access control lists You know v3 was very much of a Unix like File system so it it the access model was more or less mode bits v4 has You know these access control list that that really kind of came out of the windows world again because people anticipated that v4 could extend to Windows clients And the easiest way to do that was to kind of pick the union of features Among Unix and Windows clients so so the ACL model is is something that's more familiar maybe to to Windows folks in the sense that it is not the POSIX. It's not POSIX ACLs Well, I mean it's my personal opinion that POSIX ACLs are totally broken because they strive so hard to emulate Unix mode bits It's my personal opinion that Unix mode bits are totally broken So it does, you know, so it has it has These ACLs built in it also has other windowsy kinds of things like you know windows file system when you when a when an application opens a file it can open open it and deny access To other opens at the at the instant of open. It's kind of this atomic, you know open deny operation And v4 has a mechanism for for that as well, which is really difficult to support on Unix systems but Makes it possible to have multi-protocol servers that that could serve up both, you know, SMB and and NFS to Windows clients because it has the same you know has a common semantics for for sharing See is there other stuff? Yeah, there's other little things like it has a compound RPC The the remote procedure called mechanism in v3 is Kind of a command at a time you issue a command you get a response And it's very you know very synchronous like that in v4 the The RPC there really only is there's really only two RPCs the null RPC And then the compound and the compound contains a bunch of other remote procedure calls So you can you know load up in a single RPC an open and a Read of the first 4k in a single request And I'm not really sure if the It's the designers of the protocol thought that they would get a Performance benefit out of it. It turns out that you kind of don't And I think what it I mean my opinion is it cleans up the protocol a lot in in v3 Some of the some of the responses that you got back from the server would include extraneous information like stat information about a file that you That you modified Which you know strictly speaking is not really part of the expected response to an RPC But it was something that you would you know the designers of the v3 RPC the v2 RPC They knew you know quote new that you would always want to have this information anyway in v4 you can now sort of isolate the A request in response and then if you think that a request like a like a right request is going to require the return return of attributes Then you just throw the the get attribute request Into the compound RPC along with the right and you know it cleans up the semantics makes it easier to Reason about about what the protocols doing? All right, so you threw a whole bunch of features at us here I wonder if I could go back and touch on it at least one of them here you mentioned or Bruce mentioned earlier actually that In v3 every time you want to do something new you you made a new protocol for it in v4 You've kind of slurped all these protocols together into one So there's one protocol and one of the benefits you mentioned was you know vendor interoperability because it's all one thing now Is a new protocol itself Extensible so that you can you know do the Unanticipated things in the future without doing you know the v3 syn of creating yet another protocol on top or or are you gonna have to go that route? Yeah, it's accessible in new ways for two reasons one is as Peter mentioned it has this compound operation so the operations that you send to the To the server are built up out of lots of little operations and It also added a minor versioning Capability so you can While saying still staying within NFS before you can add additional capabilities The and the most common way to do that is by adding additional operations that can be strung together into these compounds and The latest effort there has been NFS v4 point one Which has an RFC that's just coming out now Which adds a bunch of new operations that support new features Yeah, this extensibility mechanism is actually really important When we were talking before you know before we went on the air There was a question, you know, what would end up what would we expect an NFS v5? The answer is there there should be no NFS v5. We are now Testing interoperability and completing our implementations of v4 point one now that the IETF has endorsed that the The specification for it and within the IETF we're talking about what will we want in NFS v4 point two So this minor minor versioning extension gives us a way to to move forward without having these, you know, sort of cataclysmic change At every at every every time someone has a new idea. I bet you're wondering what's in v4 point one so We've been talking a lot about Security and a lot of cleanups and fixes from v3 What specifically do you expect v4 to be able to handle a very large number of clients per server? Like you mentioned the AFS could do a lot better than NFS v3 could What kinds of things have been done for like in the high performance computing space where we may have 10,000 clients actively using the server at one time that exists in v4 that will enable that verse v3 Yeah, a lot of the motivation for the development of v4 has come out of the high performance computing community especially the the national labs and Of course what what what we learned having Designed and implemented v4 was that it wasn't enough There are things that are done in in large clusters that Are so unusual and irregular that special special mechanisms had to be invented for them things like you know 10,000 10,000 nodes opening the same file at the same time or 10,000 nodes creating a file in the same you know creating 10,000 different files, but in the same directory those kind of metadata operations Were found to be you know really slow and in fact Affecting the performance of large computations even though those kinds of operations are relatively rare I Mean they are but but those guys run on on pretty pretty bizarre machines like the Roadrunner guys that have a you know A mean time to failure of less than 24 hours, so they have to checkpoint for it fairly frequently and a checkpoint operation Involves this kind of you know massive metadata massive scale Metadata kinds of operations We're actually still working on that on those kinds of problems and The real problems that we're finding there are with the POSIX API And we may we you know we may figure out how to how to solve those kinds of problems but one of the things that we have figured out how to solve is something that has been endemic to the to NFS and indeed to any Conventional client server protocol from the start of time that is to say six to eighties And that is the single server bottleneck To the extent that a whole bunch of clients want to get access to a single file That file lives in an in a namespace the namespace dictates what server That the clients all have to go to and so everyone's got it, you know kind of get lined up behind the same server There are ways to have cluster file systems that that spread a namespace across a Bunch of servers and now there are products out there that that that do this fairly well IBM's got GPFS Poly serve which is now a part of Hewlett Packard had a pretty cool cluster file system What what those things have in common is behind the scenes they have a distributed lock manager of some sort that is Negotiating, you know the access from the various cluster nodes when when sharing takes place But presumably those guys are getting it right. They're doing a good job of it and building high-performance systems Then the question is well, how can we you know, how can we extend this into the into the NFS space so that? you know Servers can take advantage of the fact that that there are multiple cluster nodes Serving up the same namespace so that we can distribute the load across them This was actually pretty easy to do an NFS v3 because it was stateless So that all of the action took place in the background in the distributed lock manager But now that NFS v4 is a stateful protocol some Some negotiation or some some arrangement has to be made for the For the the cluster node heads that are acting as servers to you know to kind of keep things straight the obvious way to do that is to push the Consensus management and the concurrency control back into the Into the back end into the into the lock manager of the cluster file system so we found ways in in In our implementation of the protocol to support that and so now now we support cluster file systems fairly well There's another issue that arises and that is a Client trying to get access to to files that You know exceed the The servers bandwidth Ability so normally what you do here is is you stripe a file across multiple servers and You know get access to it that way now you can do this manually and In fact most operating systems have a have a way of doing that but That becomes you know kind of a an implementation that is specific to a High-performance file system a proprietary high-performance file system that will have its specific mechanisms for for arranging for striping or for you know Object storage access or or or sand access or whatever and then the vendor is is stuck with this problem of supporting You know I need now I need to get the striping mechanism running on Linux and on net BSD and on windows You know all over the place The HPC guys at the labs The folks at the labs Saw an opportunity to build support to extend the NFS protocol to build support in for this kind of Access this extended kind of access Striping and and similar things Into the protocol so that's one of the things that NFS B 4.1 has in it something called PNFS or parallel NFS which I don't know. I'm talking too much. I'm gonna let Bruce describe PNFS The idea is very simple. It just gives the Server a way to all to advertise alternate channels to a file's data So at the time that a client opens a file it can ask the server. Okay, where's the data for this file actually located? The server hands something back to the client called a layout Which tells the client? Where to go and the client goes there And there are different alternate alternatives for what there could be the client could talk directly to Disk if it happened to be attached to the same sand that the server was Client could Client could be sent to another NFS server and could just do regular NFS reads and writes to that server and there's also support for object-based protocol and the The benefit of that is that it gives you a way to offload the IO bandwidth so that you can get higher aggregate bandwidth to the to the storage Yeah, or the layout could specify, you know the the stride of the striping and the location of the striped servers It's actually a very generic and general kind of protocol It involved a small extension to NFS just involving the ability to pass layouts back and forth between the client server But you know, we try to use our imagination here at city and think of you know, like a associative search of images and stuff like that You know using layouts for that kind of crazy stuff but mostly what we're interested in is is scalability and performance using pnfs to support High, you know very high speed access to To files striped across multiple servers So what is city's involvement specifically you mentioned that you were thinking of these Like real-world kind of cases of how pnfs would be used. What does city actually work on with NFS before? Well at the moment we have two or three major sponsored projects We are part of a Department of Energy sponsored projects out of the the PsyDAC program that scientific PsyDAC stands for Dance for funding source Yeah, well, they they they've it's comes out of the DOE office of science The the pedascale data storage Institute is a group of five national labs and three universities that is Trying to push forward in in this the space in which in which DOE office of science does it work? which is you know a lot of accelerator work and and simulations and You know, they're mostly what they said what what that office supports in computing is is You know computation-oriented Projects we're on the storage side. We're like kind of unusual in that way. Anyway, so that that's one of the major projects another another is sponsored sponsorship from EMC to develop the the Layout the the NFS the pnfs client for for block layout that is to say The NFS metadata server will give a layout that gives the the the LUN, you know, the the LUN vector For a for a file Or a file system and then The client makes access to the sand Using iSCSI, but really kind of a local local this kind of stuff that parallel parallelizes pretty nicely And the the third major project that we're working on is is a native Windows NFS v4.1 client Most of the work that's been done to date in NFS v4 has been on Unix Linux You know Unix like systems. There is one NFS v4 project from a company called hummingbird, but Microsoft was interested in working with us to support pnfs on the Windows client So we're doing something that's kind of unusual at city. We're hacking in the Windows kernel to to develop a High performance, you know, that is to say, you know fast and slick client implementation for NFS v4.1 Right on top of Windows So, you know, we do sponsored research. We're a university city is a little unusual in that We have full-time staff working here Most most university research labs are you know have grad students and You know one one one faculty running a little empire of grad students here We have me one faculty running a little empire of full-time staff, you know Bruce is like the assistant director of city We have a couple of Folks that you know, they they're glued to the screen all day and their programmers their excellent programmers City really is like the technological jewel of the University of Michigan and has been for a long time We also have graduate students doing doctoral research and support undergraduates With our research sponsorships kind of as you know internships and to help develop their Their education to give them opportunities to work with professionals on research projects But as cities, you know, it's a university research lab No obvious bias in your in your qualifications there that you give it all either I think Well, you know, we kind of do like working here We get the you know the psychic rewards of being academics Let's let me ask you this you mentioned a whole pile of other organizations who are involved in NFS V4 Mostly with whom you're collaborating. Are there any other notable ones like you didn't actually mention son in there at all? I'm sorry. I meant Oracle Are they still involved in the NFS development and or you know who owns does anybody own the intellectual property or is this IETF owned or how does all that stuff kind of work? I'll answer the funding question and I'll let Bruce talk about the IP stuff The early funding for cities NFS before development came primarily from Sun Microsystems and Network Appliance. I mean Oracle and NetApp There their support You know, it was absolutely critical and it was millions of dollars of support because it was a really big job their support tailed off over the years as we As the implementation became mature and we started to kind of fill in the corners that that that needed to be filled in things like the You know, like the windows stuff and that the the block-based PNFS client So we're so we're working on in areas That are not central to protocol, but that happens son We're absolutely instrumental in the early days IBM also provided a Great deal of support you know sponsored research support In our work in developing the cluster that support for cluster file systems NetApp continues to support city and I'm imagining that there will be other other folks That that provide financial support We we got support from polyserve Anyone else? I don't know a whole bunch of you know What's what's cool about it is is that there are a lot of vendors involved in the development of v4 both in the Specification, but it also in their in their own implementations that they hope to make a lot of money You know selling products City has been kind of this neutral meeting ground For for the vendors where they can you know, they can all come and work with us and know that that You know, we don't have a bias in favor or against any one of them and You know, we are cities a vendor neutral place That supports this kind of multi-vendor activity Which is important because you know what we're trying to provide is Interoperability for a protocol so that the vendors can all go out and make the best Possible implementation and make the most possible money off of it. So now let me ask Bruce to talk about the IP stuff IP stuff The the protocols are all you know entirely neutral they're all controlled by the ITF The work that we do is is released under a Sort of BSD like open source license. That's very liberal In practice the work that's incorporated into the Linux kernel by necessity ends up being a GPL more or less So everything that city does is is open source the other implementations of course aren't all although Solaris at least should mostly be I don't know does that answer the question? Yeah, yeah, would you say that any one of these like is the work that you do that ends up going into Linux Would you consider that say, you know a reference implementation like do other people derive? You know vendors derive from that or do they write their own either from scratch or at least parts of it from scratch or? You know, how do how do they typically do that? right I expect that they write their code from scratch But we are a reference implementation in that in the sense that we provide an example example of an implementation of the protocol and We're often one of the First testing targets are the first testing target And we also provide some other testing tools We have a you know complete set of regression tests and pie and fest that's widely used by server Yeah, we wrote a complete implementation of NFS v4 in Python Which oh wow yeah, and it's it's it's fabulous for for testing because you can build scripts that do the sort of thing that you know it'd be difficult to To make exactly the you know some some specific behavior occur In a file system by manipulating the file system externally But because we have all of the components of NFS v4 In written in Python, you can build these bizarro scripts that test wild error conditions or Performance performance kinds of things Interoperability is is you know is key when you're developing a protocol like this. So yeah, we have we The intent all along was for our our work to be a reference implementation That vendors would use to look over our shoulder But also for testing correctness of their own implementation In this to the extent that they interoperate with us then their implementation is correct That's kind of arrogant really if if they're if the interoperability If interoperability fails Then you know we both sit down and go over the spec Line by line and go over our code line by line figure out, you know, who's who is broken? Sure, it's kind of the transitivity of of interoperability, right? Yeah. Yeah, but we have like three We've been having three meetings per year for years now for over five years bake-a-thons and and the annual connect-a-thon which our interoperability bake-off kinds of Testing We have one coming up in a few weeks, right first week in October will all be in Austin You know a bunch of geeks sitting there with their computers pointing them at each other and looking for problems. Yeah It's really pretty funny. It's a long table with a lot of geeks Outstanding so so what's the what's kind of the uptake of NFS v4?  You know, can I go out and get an NFS v4 clients and servers and put them on my cluster today? Or you know, where where are we in the adoption process? Yeah, I'm guessing that whatever it is that you're running has v4 today And what do you have? I've got red hat version 4 so probably not Yeah modern versions of modern be the keyword there someday I'll get around updating the red hat 5 but I'm I'm several thousand miles away from my cluster So I don't have an easy luxury to do that yeah v4 First appeared in 2.6 and it has matured with the with the numerous releases of 2.6 and with bug fixes and performance enhancements But anyone running Linux anyone running a you know recent version of Linux has v4 now whether they're using v4 is another question because The client-servant negotiate which version they're gonna of NFS are gonna use v2 v3 v4 and I'm not I'm not sure that a lot of people are using v4 at this point. I Know that you know a lot of Sun customers are using it but You know honestly the you know the driving force for v4 in the early days was expected to be security and and long-haul performance But those turn out not to be huge market drivers You know as usual nobody wants to pay for security So nobody and even though they have v4 They don't want to pay for the administrative overhead of having to learn You know how to set up your mounts and your exports for v4 Everything seems to be working okay for v3. So let's just stick with that and the long-haul stuff Turns out not to have Been you know big enough market to to to really drive A cut over we're thinking that PNFS in 4.1 will be the thing that pushes HPC and some other enterprise scale folks You know the petrochemical industry the financial industries Into demanding the features that that that that 4.1 offers Features offer And So, you know, I guess we're kind of looking at the market the v4 market really exploding like in 2011 time frame, you know at the moment 4.1 is still being You know that the protocol is is specked out the RFC will be out any day. It was approved by the Internet Activities board One of the one of these, you know, IETF guru kind of things They approved the the final specification of it last December. It's been in the hands of the RFC editors To dot all the eyes and to get all the witches and that's right So we're awaiting the actual release of the RFC, but the the spec that was approved is the specification of the protocol And we're spending the the current candle calendar year Completing all of the implementations Which they really are pretty much complete But then we have to you know, there's this process of getting things into the Linux kernel that involves a Consent consensus management among developers and maintainers now Bruce is one of the co-maintenors of the NFS server The the client maintainer also lives in Ann Arbor and we work very closely with him John Mikkelbust But those guys are you know And it's funny. I mean Bruce is sitting right next to me and you know, I I pay his salary But in a way he works for Linus, you know He is addressing some concerns that You know that the that the folks that are sponsoring the research here the R&D here They're not as all that interested in getting everything right. They really want to get things done Whereas Bruce has a vested interest in getting things right. I stop speaking for you Well, there's a process and there's been a long prototyping process going on in 4.1 And people have demonstrated that the 4.1 can be made to work between, you know, two independently implemented Clients and servers at this point and Have demonstrated that they can get some of the performance characteristics out of it that are driving it But there's some work that needs to be done to go from those prototypes to something that Handles all the kernel the all the sort of corner cases and Walt eat your data when something goes a little bit wrong and Has code that's just easy to understand and that can be maintained in the future by the kernel community Yeah, I mean tainers care about maintenance. I don't know what the deal is with that so there's a process of negotiation there and you know the people who are working on the prototype trying to try and make it a you know more correct and cleaner and then submitting it to to the kernel maintainers and And it's a show to the kernel community and it's a big change so that shoveling that much change into the kernel It has to be refactored in ways that it can be you know understood and digested by the developers that have a stake in all of this and at some point consensus happens and the maintainers Allow things to you know to slip through the sieve so our our hope is that And here I'm speaking for me not for Bruce is that we can get PNFS into the Linux kernel in the current calendar year and then spend 2010 Soaking it and working on performance issues and doing instrumentation and scalability testing So that by the end of 2010 it really is ready for for enterprise. So the enterprise on the of the of the you know our hell kind of kind of customer we expect that There will be early adopters in the HPC community Especially at the at the national labs that start using PNFS that are well they're using PNFS now in some instances, but You know for those guys It's really important that they're the kernel that they get from kernel org have everything they they need and they did not do special kinds of patching to build the kernels that that they need so You know, so that's the you know, that's the kind of the the road map That that what that we're looking at and some of that you know some of the constraints and the difficulties In the this is a social process of developing Software in this multi-vendor kind of environment Okay guys, so is there Like the tools for anything like PNFS if someone did want to try it Things that are not shipped with the links kernel right now like an NFS v4 website anything like that where are those located? Okay, yeah, we do have software repositories with our experimental code we have a mailing list which people are welcome to ask questions on and the Best thing to do will just be to Google for PNFS and Linux and that will ultimately get you to a git tree and Then you just you know kind of whatever it is that you do to a git tree Get it you get it And then you you know and you build it and yeah, I mean it's it is ready and waiting for for people interested in In using it in in tests kind of scenarios in fact Brock and I were talking this morning about you know What could we do between city and and and his lab? to you know, maybe play around with with some of the you know scalability characteristics In that are that are developing in storage protocols As an adjunct to the kind of stuff that they do, you know kind of on a day-by-day basis So that's that's kind of where it's at now is is interested People, you know geeks with with some time on their hands and kind of you know a little bit of craziness Are playing around with it and and benefiting from it? But it won't be until it's You know integrated in into the kernel or kernel into the mainline kernel That you know ordinary people Ordinary geeks Well, we'll start getting their hands on it, but early early adopters now Are welcome and and a bunch of people are playing with it At you're right at this moment Okay, thanks a lot Peter and Bruce for your time talking about NFS before The 4.1 standard is hopefully something we see soon And you can get this show at www.rce-cast.com There's an RSS feed and iTunes link or you can always just download the MP3s or at least every other Thanks Thanks a lot. Thanks guys. Thank you


My research looks at the impact that international migration bears on social norms in the origin country and how these social norms then have an impact on further economic and social development in the country. Specifically we're looking at the case of Jordan where there has been insistent calls for political and social change in the last years. Our idea is that international migrants while living abroad assimilate social norms of the destination countries. And when they return back home they spread those norms in their communities and their households. Women at work are important not only for economic development but also for social development. International policies that aim at increasing the participation of women in work may sometimes fail to tackle the issue. The reason why is because there are some discrimination at household levels and this is where my research comes in. I'm looking at women that has a member of the family that lived abroad enabling Arab and Gulf countries and I'm looking at whether they bear a different perception of women such as in the society. Ideally I would want to compare two identical women one having a migrant abroad and one having no migrant experience. However we all know that migrants are not randomly distributed in the population but they have some characteristics that makes them different from the rest of the population. So in order to tackle this issue I am controlling for the selection into migration and I'm also controlling for the fact that among those people currently living abroad all those who come back are self-selected. Also those who come back they may have failed their migration experience while living abroad and hence this is the reason why they come back or they have some other characteristics which are not known to us. When it comes to emigrating I'm looking at real oil prices historical that has nothing to do with the persons but affect the probability of migrating in the foreign labor market. On the contrary when it comes to returning in Jordan I'm looking at shocks made by wars in neighboring countries which again affect the probability of coming back to Jordan but it's not linked to the characteristics of the person. I find that women that has a member of the family that lived abroad experience more discrimination compared to women that has no migration experience in the family. Answers to a survey on the perception of the women's status in the society by women with a migrant in the family are radically different from those of women with no migration experience in the family. Their own self-perceived gender norms are more discriminatory compared to those of other women. We also show that women with a member that lived abroad in Gulf countries they are more likely to drop out from education they are less likely to work and they have more children and these from previous research we know that it's going to have great impact on economic development. The bottom line of my research is that international migration act as a driver of political and social change in origin countries. However, destination matters and not always the norms acquired abroad are superior to the one in place at home.


Sentinel, two images have been used to improve global crop monitoring in smallholder agriculture zones, such as those in Madagascar. A combination of random forest, RF, classifiers and object-based approaches were used to reduce the number of variables and optimize the performance of the classifier. This resulted in a reduction of the data processing time and an increase in the overall accuracy of the classification. Spectral variables derived from an HSR time series were found to be the most discriminating, while VHSR data were only needed for segmentation purposes. This article was authored by Valentine Mabourgeois, Staphan Dupuy, Elodie Vintru, and others.