Re: GFS, what's remaining

[D. Hazelton]

On Saturday 03 September 2005 02:14, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-09-03 at 13:18 +0800, David Teigland wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 01:21:04PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > > - Why GFS is better than OCFS2, or has functionality which
> > > > > OCFS2 cannot possibly gain (or vice versa)
> > > > >
> > > > > - Relative merits of the two offerings
> > > >
> > > > You missed the important one - people actively use it and
> > > > have been for some years. Same reason with have NTFS, HPFS,
> > > > and all the others. On that alone it makes sense to include.
> > >
> > > Again, that's not a technical reason.  It's _a_ reason, sure. 
> > > But what are the technical reasons for merging gfs[2], ocfs2,
> > > both or neither?
> > >
> > > If one can be grown to encompass the capabilities of the other
> > > then we're left with a bunch of legacy code and wasted effort.
> >
> > GFS is an established fs, it's not going away, you'd be hard
> > pressed to find a more widely used cluster fs on Linux.  GFS is
> > about 10 years old and has been in use by customers in production
> > environments for about 5 years.
>
> but you submitted GFS2 not GFS.

I'd rather not step into the middle of this mess, but you clipped out 
a good portion that explains why he talks about GFS when he submitted 
GFS2.  Let me quote the post you've pulled that partial paragraph 
from: "The latest development cycle (GFS2) has focused on improving
performance, it's not a new file system -- the "2" indicates that it's 
not ondisk compatible with earlier versions."

In other words he didn't submit the original, but the new version of 
it that is not compatable with the original GFS on disk format.  
While it is clear that GFS2 cannot claim the large installed user 
base or the proven capacity of the original (it is, after all, a new 
version that has incompatabilities) it can claim that as it's 
heritage and what it's aiming towards, the same as ext3 can (and 
does) claim the power and reliability of ext2.

In this case I've been following this thread just for the hell of it 
and I've noticed that there are some people who seem to not want to 
even think of having GFS2 included in a mainline kernel for personal 
and not technical reasons. That does not describe most of the people 
on this list, many of whom have helped debug the code (among other 
things), but it does describe a few.

I'll go back to being quiet now... 

DRH

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