zabbo

Today Linus announced 2.6.16-rc1 which is the first -rc to hit after OCFS2 was merged into the mainline kernel. OCFS2 is one of the first things I worked on after joining Oracle and I’m pretty happy that it’s come this far.

I guess I should step back and explain it a little. OCFS2 is a clustered file system. It lets a collection of nodes treat shared storage as a single file system. Nodes are equal in their use of the file system which means that a node can fail, say by losing power, and the rest of the nodes can carry on using the file system after they briefly clean up what the failed node was doing.

We tried hard to make it easy to use. The most basic setup will not come as a shock to Linux administrators. You:

1. install an ocfs2-util rpm on all nodes
2. make sure a config file represents nodes in the cluster and is identical on all nodes
3. start cluster services by running an init script
4. run mkfs.ocfs2 from a node to format the file system
5. mount the file system from all nodes

It still has some warts, of course, but all in all I think it’s a good piece of engineering. I’d be interested in hearing if any of my friends end up playing with it. I know that Ubuuntu and SLES have been including OCFS2 for a while and there is a good chance that we’ll get the tools into Fedora Core extras. If nothing else, the tools can be found in the OCFS2 Tools project on oss.oracle.com.