re: SSI Clusters & XFS?

[Greg Freemyer <freemyer@NorcrossGroup.com>]

Jameel,

SSI Linux supports OpenGFS and CFS as the shared FS.

OpenGFS is robust and can handle a server/node crash.  OpenGFS is a full OS and cannot be layered over XFS..

CFS is not yet robust, so IIRC when a node dies your whole cluster goes down.

The good part about CFS is that it layers on top of a normal local FS, so I _assume_ it would be compatible with XFS.

Per Bruce Walker of the SSI team, they hope to get a HA version of CFS out this month!!!

At that point it will be worth testing CFS over XFS in a SSI cluster to see how well the whole thing works together.

If you want to pursue it, you should ask on the SSI list if they could make the HA CFS release against a newer kernel. 

Note:
I have no idea what kernel they are currently planning to release against, but since they are "pre-alpha" they have not been very worried about using a old kernel.

As of the HA CFS release I suspect they will be getting a wider set of users and a newer kernel will be more important independent of XFS.

Greg Freemyer


 >>  Has anyone used the Single Systems Image (SSI) for Linux code with XFS in
 >>  the same kernel?

 >>  http://ssic-linux.sourceforge.net/install.shtml

 >>  These assume a 2.4.18 kernel.. I don't see why you couldn't apply the XFS
 >>  patches to it as well (or apply the SSI patches to a XFS CVS checkout).
 >>  Seems to me that using XFS for the shared cluster filesystem would be a
 >>  Good Thing..

 >>  The Sourceforge mailing list search doesn't seem to return anything about
 >>  XFS.. then again it is running suspiciously slow, so I don't know.

 >>  The SGI Altix 3000 announcement made me think more about clustering...
 >>  mainly because I can't afford anything like an Altix with a "proper"
 >>  single image. ;)



 >>  #!/jameel/akari
 >>  sleep 4800;
 >>  make clean && make breakfast