GFS released under the GPL

Posted Jun 26, 2004 21:16 UTC (Sat) by stevef (guest, #7712)
Parent article: GFS released under the GPL

A detailed comparison of the Linux cluster filesystems on their technical merits would make a great technical paper (or Masters thesis). We are long overdue for a comparison of them on:
a) their network protocol, and how well the operations map to the Linux VFS
b) their Linux 2.6 implementation

I suspect that the most widely used on Linux are:
1) SANFS (Storage Tank)
2) GPFS
3) GFS
4) Lustre

But with the increase in ethernet speeds, the two popular network filesystems (perhaps with minor extensions) NFSv4 or CIFS, should be able to compete with SAN like approaches in some cluster environments as well.

A major problem with the cluster filesystems is that although some have open source implementations, they don't have standards documents written up for their metadata operations that sit above the block layer (iSCSI itself is pretty well documented but is lower layer). For the two most popular network filesystems they have deteailed protocol descriptions written up: obviously NFS in the IETF, and CIFS from SNIA.

GFS released under the GPL

Posted Jun 28, 2004 5:55 UTC (Mon) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

The VFS improved a lot in 2.6 over 2.4 for network and cluster filesystems, with a few more changes to the VFS in 2.7 we may be able to achieve essentially local file i/o semantics over non-local filesystems which we can not quite do today.

Au contraire, GFS has already achieved that. The last of the GFS VFS patches (beyond a trivial export or two) is in play on lkml now, the cluster flock patch, which GFS doesn't need except to support local filesystem semantics for flock and fcntl locks.