diff options
126 files changed, 40245 insertions, 6 deletions
@@ -3550,11 +3550,11 @@ S: Fargo, North Dakota 58122 S: USA N: Steven Whitehouse -E: SteveW@ACM.org +E: steve@chygwyn.com W: http://www.chygwyn.com/~steve -D: Linux DECnet project: http://www.sucs.swan.ac.uk/~rohan/DECnet/index.html +D: Linux DECnet project D: Minor debugging of other networking protocols. -D: Misc bug fixes and filesystem development +D: Misc bug fixes and GFS2 filesystem development N: Hans-Joachim Widmaier E: hjw@zvw.de diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/gfs2.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/gfs2.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000000..593004b6bba --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/gfs2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +Global File System +------------------ + +http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/ + +GFS is a cluster file system. It allows a cluster of computers to +simultaneously use a block device that is shared between them (with FC, +iSCSI, NBD, etc). GFS reads and writes to the block device like a local +file system, but also uses a lock module to allow the computers coordinate +their I/O so file system consistency is maintained. One of the nifty +features of GFS is perfect consistency -- changes made to the file system +on one machine show up immediately on all other machines in the cluster. + +GFS uses interchangable inter-node locking mechanisms. Different lock +modules can plug into GFS and each file system selects the appropriate +lock module at mount time. Lock modules include: + + 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/ + +In addition to interfacing with an external locking manager, a gfs lock +module is responsible for interacting with external cluster management +systems. Lock_dlm depends on user space cluster management systems found +at the URL above. + +To use gfs as a local file system, no external clustering systems are +needed, simply: + |