On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 11:17:08PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > > > Again, that's not a technical reason. It's _a_ reason, sure. But what are > > the technical reasons for merging gfs[2], ocfs2, both or neither? clusterfilesystems are very common, there are companies that had/have a whole business around it, veritas, polyserve, ex-sistina, thus now redhat, ibm, tons of companies out there sell this, big bucks. as someone said, it's different than nfs because for certian things there is less overhead but there are many other reasons, it makes it a lot easier to create a clustered nfs server so you create a cfs on a set of disks with a number of nodes and export that fs from all those, you can easily do loadbalancing for applications, you have a lot of infrastructure where people have invested in that allows for shared storage... for ocfs we have tons of production customers running many terabyte databases on a cfs. why ? because dealing with the raw disk froma number of nodes sucks. because nfs is pretty broken for a lot of stuff, there is no consistency across nodes when each machine nfs mounts a server partition. yes nfs can be used for things but cfs's are very useful for many things nfs just can't do. want a list ? companies building failover for services like to use things like this, it creates a non single point of failure kind of setup much more easily. andso on and so on, yes there are alternatives out there but fact is that a lot of folks like to use it, have been using it for ages, and want to be using it. from an implementation point of view, as folks here have already said, we 've tried our best to implement things as a real linux filesystem, no abstractions to have something generic, it's clean and as tight as can be for a lot of stuff. and compared to other cfs's it's pretty darned nice, however I think it's silly to have competition between ocfs2 and gfs2. they are different just like the ton of local filesystems are different and people like to use one or/over the other. david said gfs is popular and has been around, well, I can list you tons of folks that have been using our stuff 24/7 for years (for free) just as well. it's different. that's that. it'd be really nice if mainline kernel had it/them included. it would be a good start to get more folks involved and instead of years of talk on maillists that end up in nothing actually end up with folks participating and contributing. -- Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
