[Linux-cluster] A few GFS newbie questions: journals, etc

[gwood at dragonhold.org]

> Ok, so let me reiterate:
>
>    If I don't even care about quorum and the cluster.  I just want a
> filesystem that will server out a block device, which is what gfs does.
Not really.  The whole point of GFS is that it shares a filesystem, not a
block device, and in a controlled manner.  If you want a cluster aware
block device, that's a different issue - a lot of overlap, and it could be
implemented by using a loopback mount on top of gfs, but could be done
quite a bit simpler too I would have thought.

> I'm not worried about "split brain" issues.
The GFS may not be the thing for you - especially if you're after a block
device.  GFS, like almost all clustering products, treats data integrity
as the most important thing.  The system is designed to die rather than
risk corrupting your data.

Your database being unavailable for 15 minutes while you sort out a quorum
issue is much better for 99.9999% of people than allowing it to run and
totally corrupting the data - that's one of the reasons behind the way it
works.

I'm not saying that GFS cannot do what you are after - hell, if necessary,
a patch to allow you to force the number of quorum votes shouldn't be that
difficult - but you do seem to be trying to force a square peg into a
round hole.