[Linux-cluster] Samba Technical thread

[Christopher R. Hertel]

There's a thread started on the Samba-Technical mailing list that has some 
discussion regarding cluster filesystems.  I'm learning fast, but I'm not 
the right one to answer this:

  http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2004-December/038326.html

An excerpt:

  The other network-like filesystems - Lustre, SANFS, GPFS, and RedHat's 
  GFS do differ a little..  They differ in that they would attempt
  stricter posix semantics and therefore view themselves as "cluster"  
  rather than "network" filesystems (an odd distinction ... why shouldn't
  a network filesystem simply consider "cluster" in effect a mount option
  which would optimize for higher performance to nearby hosts in the
  cluster and stricter POSIX file semantics rather than relaxed "nfs file
  semantics").  If they had a good standards story with the IETF and were
  inkernel in 2.6, perhaps no one would care, but it seems odd - when you
  can make AFS or CIFS or NFSv4 do the same with rather more trivial
  changes.

Somehow I think that the above doesn't quite capture what GFS is all 
about.  I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I'd certainly like to see 
someone provide a clearer explanation than I could do.

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org