cluster fs

[Donald Becker]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Martin Siegert wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Alexander Korenkov wrote:
> 
> > Could you advice me - what is the best file system for clusters?
> > If this cluster is homogeneous (Linux).
> 
> What about XFS?
> >From http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs :
>  A complete linux 2.4.0-test1 tree including the XFS filesystem is available
>  for cvs checkout. 
> 
>  The code is pre-Beta quality and although the basic functionality is
>  operational, it may hang or crash your machine."
> 
> I've used XFS only under IRIX.
> Has anybody tried it under Linux?
> Is it usable already?

The first snapshot in the spring was not usable -- it was very prone to
crashes.

This isn't a XFS filesystem port for Linux.  It's porting Linux to the XFS
filesystem, and is a major change to many parts of the kernel, including the
VFS interface structure and semantics.  The only way to get the code is as a
whole new kernel.  If you try to build your own patch file you find out
why: the patch is very large.

The SGI-Linux kernel does offer several new features beyond XFS.  It
includes a kernel debugger interface, large file support (*1), and raw (aka
direct) disk I/O apparently intented to appeal to Oracle (*2).

There appears to be many interesting ideas in the SGI-Linux kernel.  But the
diverging CVS tree approach does make it very difficult to figure out what
they have done, or to use XFS in any kernel but the SGI branch.

*1) Alas, the SGI LFS implementation is incompatible with the Scyld LFS
    support.  Our LFS was available before the SGI release, but wasn't
    available when they started.
*2) Even so, Oracle ended up announcing a partnership with Red Hat.

Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Beowulf Clusters / Linux Installations
Annapolis MD 21403