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From Gfswiki
About GFS
- What Is GFS?
GFS is a shared storage journaled cluster file system. It uses either a redundant server locking mechanism (called GULM), or use a distributed lock manager (GDLM). With the release of Fedora Core 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, GULM will no longer be supported.
- What GFS isn't
GFS is not in the same league as projects such as AFS, Coda, or Intermezzo. It has no client side caching of any sort. It's intended to talk directly to storage (although that can happen by exporting the storage via GNBD, iSCSI, etc.). There is no concept of client and server, there is only raw storage and mounters.
- History
It was originally developed as a thesis project at the University of Minnesota. At some point it made its way to Sistina Software, where it lived for a time as an open source project. Sometime in 2001 Sistina made the choice to make GFS a commercial product not under an open source license. OpenGFS was forked from the last public release of GFS. In December of 2003, Sistina was purchased by Red Hat, which brings us to the present.
- Present
In late June 2004, Red Hat (re-)released GFS and many cluster infrastructure pieces under the GPL. The current goal (aside from the normal bug fixing and stabilization) is for mainline kernel inclusion. Work is currently underway to integrate the second generation of GFS (called GFS2) with the Linux 2.6 kernel.
- Installation -- based on Usage.txt
- GNBD installation -- how to use local disks on remote nodes instead of a san. GNBD installation, configuration and usage.
- Faq -- add your questions/answers here
