[Linux-cluster] Using GFS2 as a local file system

[Wendy Cheng]

Lin Shen (lshen) wrote:

>We have a situation that we may need to use GFS2 to share storage in our
>system in the future and to ease the pain of transition at that time
>(convert files into GFS), we're thinking of using GFS2 just as a local
>file system for now. 
>
>How is GFS2 compared to other popular local file systems such as ext3
>and Reiser in terms of performance, overhead etc? Are we hitting the
>wrong direction totally by using GFS2 just as a local file system? 
>
>BTW, we've run bonnie on local GFS2, and the performance is decent
>compared to ext3 (90%).
>
>
>  
>
I personally think using GFS (both GFS1 and GFS2) as a local filesystem 
has many advantages. The only issue (I think ..haven't checked mkfs code 
in ages) is lock protocol is hard coded into on-disk super block during 
mkfs time - but fixing this should be trivial. If we allow 
interchangeable between lock_nolock and lock_dlm, then the filesystem 
should be able to migrate from single node into cluster environment. It 
is very nice (IMHO).

In the mean time, you can always run GFS(s) using lock_dlm with single 
node. There are lock overhead though.

I understand people may have different opinions about this and certainly 
don't have time to get into heated debating about this issue right now.

BTW, the team will spend this quarter to fine-tune GFS2. Would like to 
suggest people wait a little bit before putting GFS2 into a production 
environment.

-- Wendy