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Red Hat announces GFS

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the everyone-likes-a-new-fs dept.

PSUdaemon writes "Over at Kernel Trap they have an announcment that Red Hat has released GFS under the GPL and offer it through RHN. This could potentially be a very substantial offering from Red Hat."

10 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Compatibility? by Grant29 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Will it run on distros other than Redhat? According to the linked page, it looks like it only for redhat enterprise platforms.

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  2. It also helps virtualisation by Alan+Cox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think the other people have covered the basics pretty well - plug lots of computers into one fibrechannel or possibly firewire disk or disk array.

    The second really interesting use is with virtualisation - imagine if you want all your S/390 virtual machines to share the same bsse file systems for efficiency (given the price IBM charge for mainframe disks ;)) or the same with uml, Zen, etc

  3. `GFS' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was reading only the other day about the Google File System. So there are now two acronymns which are both GFS which both refer to a distributed file system. That's not going to get confusing. Nope, not at all.

  4. Good Distributed Filesystems? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Are there any distributed filesystems that don't have serious issues?

    I mean, NFS has issues with security (relying on numeric user id's sent by the client is a nightmare). Locking is problematic. Different versions have severe compatibility issues.

    I forget the issues with AFS, but it's successor, Coda, seems not very mature, although it is one of the more promising filesystems out there. InterMezzo is a more complete and robust implementation of the Coda featureset, but is Linux-only.

    SFS looks very promising (simple, but effective), but requires NFSv3 clients and servers to interact with the kernel.

    None of these filesystems allows regular users to access remote filesystems (superuser privileges are required for mounting) like with FTP.

    What's so hard about getting this stuff right? And can we please have kernels that support userspace filesystem drivers (or, better, any drivers)? (Yes, I know about LUFS and FUSE).

    Ok, rant over. Thoughtful comments, corrections and pointers appreciated.

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    1. Re:Good Distributed Filesystems? by Salamander · · Score: 4, Interesting
      None of these filesystems allows regular users to access remote filesystems (superuser privileges are required for mounting) like with FTP

      No, and they don't cook your dinner for you either, but if that's what you're expecting then you're completely missing the point of what a cluster filesystem is for. Granted, the name "Global File System" is a misnomer, but it has been a misnomer for several years now and if you have anything more than a dilettante's interest in this you should know what GFS really does.

      What's so hard about getting this stuff right?

      Yeah, everything's easy when you're not the one doing it. Tell me what you do, and I'll tell you how wimpy that is. If you think that maintaining consistency across multiple machines in a cluster without compromising performance is easy, you're a fool. If you think that high availability of any form is easy, then you're an idiot. If you think putting those two together doesn't lead to an exponential increase in complexity and hence difficulty, you're a moron.

      If you want a filesystem stub (not really a complete filesystem) that lets you access files stored half-way around the world over a standard protocol, look into one of the many efforts based on WebDAV. If you want a true global filesystem, look into OceanStore so you can appreciate some of the problems that are involved. If you want to be able to change the filesystem namespace without being root, look into Plan 9. Do your own googling. None of those are what GFS is about.

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  5. an idea whose time has come ... and gone by dekeji · · Score: 3, Interesting

    GFS has a number of useful applications. But I think the times where you could design your enterprise around the idea of a globally consistent file storage system are over: enterprises are getting more flexible, more decentralized, and people would prefer not to have to deal with IT staff over issues such as file space and permissions. And they can avoid it--since many of them make the purchasing decisions.

  6. What about security? by ee96090 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't see security in the least of features. Calling this a Global file system is a bit presumptuous, considering the lack of security prevents it from being used outside of a closed LAN segment.

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  7. First Linux distro with GFS by rkoski · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Released today, see more at Always Current Lineox Enterprise Linux Gets Global File System (GFS) Support.

  8. I don't think so by Donny+Smith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think so.

    Red Hat's HA clustering software is also GPL but it doesn't run on other distros (and is not supported by Red Hat on other distros).

    The code itself is open source, that is true, but "Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription [is] required" (http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/)

  9. Re:Not quite, but OpenAFS would be a good option by tchuladdiass · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If your looking for a more falt-tolerant nfs, try combining it with the network block driver (nb) and raid-1 (md). The basic technique is to mirror a volume between a local disk slice and a remote partition, using md to do the mirroring and the nb driver to access the remote slice. If you want, you could also set up several remote slices on different boxes, and set up raid-5 among them.