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Re: Cluster filesystems



Camm Maguire wrote:
> Greetings!  Anyone care to offer their opinions on this?  Anyone find
> it useful?  Should it be packaged?
> GFS.  http://www.globalfilesystem.org/

I saw the talk at the UK Linux Developers' Conference a couple of weeks
ago. It provides a good infrastructure for applications with large IO
requirements. Particularly clever is that the root file system can be on
shared storage, getting us even closer to single system image. You do
this with host specific links, so that /etc is actually a link to
/etc.{hostname}. The next release has journalling.

You do need expensive hardware to get the most out of it. Shared SCSI
will do small systems, but if you're thinking big you should use
FibreChannel. You can also use a variant of NBD, so that GFS shares the
same transport as the rest of your cluster traffic. Alternatively, you
can use FibreChannel as your cluster interconnect (if Linux has IP over
FibreChannel: my quick try with Google didn't turn up anything).

- Adrian Cox, AG Electronics



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