Global File System¶
https://fedorahosted.org/cluster/wiki/HomePage
GFS is a cluster file system. It allows a cluster of computers tosimultaneously use a block device that is shared between them (with FC,iSCSI, NBD, etc). GFS reads and writes to the block device like a localfile system, but also uses a lock module to allow the computers coordinatetheir I/O so file system consistency is maintained. One of the niftyfeatures of GFS is perfect consistency – changes made to the file systemon one machine show up immediately on all other machines in the cluster.
GFS uses interchangeable inter-node locking mechanisms, the currentlysupported mechanisms are:
- lock_nolock
- allows gfs to be used as a local file system
- lock_dlm
- uses a distributed lock manager (dlm) for inter-node locking.The dlm is found at linux/fs/dlm/
Lock_dlm depends on user space cluster management systems foundat the URL above.
To use gfs as a local file system, no external clustering systems areneeded, simply:
$ mkfs -t gfs2 -p lock_nolock -j 1 /dev/block_device$ mount -t gfs2 /dev/block_device /dir
If you are using Fedora, you need to install the gfs2-utils packageand, for lock_dlm, you will also need to install the cman packageand write a cluster.conf as per the documentation. For F17 and abovecman has been replaced by the dlm package.
GFS2 is not on-disk compatible with previous versions of GFS, but itis pretty close.
The following man pages can be found at the URL above:
fsck.gfs2 to repair a filesystem gfs2_grow to expand a filesystem online gfs2_jadd to add journals to a filesystem online tunegfs2 to manipulate, examine and tune a filesystem gfs2_convert to convert a gfs filesystem to gfs2 in-place mkfs.gfs2 to make a filesystem