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Chapter 1. GFS2 Overview
The Red Hat GFS2 file system is a 64-bit symmetric cluster file system which provides a shared namespace and manages coherency between multiple nodes sharing a common block device. A GFS2 file system is intended to provide a feature set which is as close as possible to a local file system, while at the same time enforcing full cluster coherency between nodes. In a few cases, the Linux file system API does not allow the clustered nature of GFS2 to be totally transparent; for example, programs using Posix locks in GFS2 should avoid using the
GETLK function since, in a clustered environment, the process ID may be for a different node in the cluster. In most cases however, the functionality of a GFS2 file system is identical to that of a local file system.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Resilient Storage Add-On provides GFS2, and it depends on the RHEL High Availability Add-On to provide the cluster management required by GFS2. For information about the High Availability Add-On see Configuring and Managing a Red Hat Cluster.
The
gfs2.ko kernel module implements the GFS2 file system and is loaded on GFS2 cluster nodes.
To get the best performance from GFS2, it is important to take into account the performance considerations which stem from the underlying design. Just like a local file system, GFS2 relies on the page cache in order to improve performance by local caching of frequently used data. In order to maintain coherency across the nodes in the cluster, cache control is provided by the glock state machine. For more information on glocks and their performance implications, see Section 2.9, “GFS2 Node Locking”.
This chapter provides some basic, abbreviated information as background to help you understand GFS2.
1.1. GFS2 Support Limits
Table 1.1, “GFS2 Support Limits” summarizes the current maximum file system size and number of nodes that GFS2 supports.
Table 1.1. GFS2 Support Limits
| Maximum number of node |
16 (x86, Power8 on PowerVM)
4 (s390x under z/VM)
|
| Maximum file system size | 100TB on all supported architectures |
GFS2 is based on a 64-bit architecture, which can theoretically accommodate an 8 EB file system. If your system requires larger GFS2 file systems than are currently supported, contact your Red Hat service representative.
Note
Although a GFS2 file system can be implemented in a standalone system or as part of a cluster configuration, for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 release Red Hat does not support the use of GFS2 as a single-node file system. Red Hat does support a number of high-performance single node file systems which are optimized for single node and thus have generally lower overhead than a cluster file system. Red Hat recommends using these file systems in preference to GFS2 in cases where only a single node needs to mount the file system.
Red Hat will continue to support single-node GFS2 file systems for mounting snapshots of cluster file systems (for example, for backup purposes).
When determining the size of your file system, you should consider your recovery needs. Running the
fsck.gfs2 command on a very large file system can take a long time and consume a large amount of memory. Additionally, in the event of a disk or disk subsystem failure, recovery time is limited by the speed of your backup media. For information on the amount of memory the fsck.gfs2 command requires, see Section 3.10, “Repairing a GFS2 File System”.
While a GFS2 file system may be used outside of LVM, Red Hat supports only GFS2 file systems that are created on a CLVM logical volume. CLVM is included in the Resilient Storage Add-On. It is a cluster-wide implementation of LVM, enabled by the CLVM daemon
clvmd, which manages LVM logical volumes in a cluster. The daemon makes it possible to use LVM2 to manage logical volumes across a cluster, allowing all nodes in the cluster to share the logical volumes. For information on the LVM volume manager, see Logical Volume Manager Administration.
Note
When you configure a GFS2 file system as a cluster file system, you must ensure that all nodes in the cluster have access to the shared storage. Asymmetric cluster configurations in which some nodes have access to the shared storage and others do not are not supported. This does not require that all nodes actually mount the GFS2 file system itself.
