There's a thread started on the Samba-Technical mailing list that has some discussion regarding cluster filesystems. I'm learning fast, but I'm not the right one to answer this: http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2004-December/038326.html An excerpt: The other network-like filesystems - Lustre, SANFS, GPFS, and RedHat's GFS do differ a little.. They differ in that they would attempt stricter posix semantics and therefore view themselves as "cluster" rather than "network" filesystems (an odd distinction ... why shouldn't a network filesystem simply consider "cluster" in effect a mount option which would optimize for higher performance to nearby hosts in the cluster and stricter POSIX file semantics rather than relaxed "nfs file semantics"). If they had a good standards story with the IETF and were inkernel in 2.6, perhaps no one would care, but it seems odd - when you can make AFS or CIFS or NFSv4 do the same with rather more trivial changes. Somehow I think that the above doesn't quite capture what GFS is all about. I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I'd certainly like to see someone provide a clearer explanation than I could do. Chris -)----- -- "Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/ -)----- Christopher R. Hertel jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/ -)----- ubiqx development, uninq. ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/ -)----- crh@xxxxxxxxxxxx OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/ -)----- crh@xxxxxxxxx
