Red Hat announces GFS

PSUdaemon writes "Over at Kernel Trap they have an announcment that Red Hat has released GFS under the GPL and offer it through RHN. This could potentially be a very substantial offering from Red Hat."

executive summary?

[Speare]

Would it be too much to ask that the writeup blurb include a ten-word summary of what makes GFS any different from any other Linux-ready filesystem? Many sites get slashdotted, making most links unusable for 12 hours or more.

Re:executive summary?

[Night Goat]

I'd be happy with just the mention that it IS a file system. I had no idea what GFS was until I read your post.

Re:Free for $2,200?

[CdBee]

Just because its opensource doesn't mean you can download it for free. Under the GPL suppliers are only required to make the source code available to people who buy/legally obtain the product. It's perfectly possible that you still have to pay to get the binary, although of course once you have it you can compile your own version from the code and sell it or give it away.

Still needs to be said - Opensource means free as in speech

Re:executive summary?

[elmegil]

I want to see the numbers that prove the "high performance". This is a hard problem, and many others have tried to solve it, with pretty mixed results. I'm very skeptical that a newcomer to the project has solved it, but I'm willing to be convinced. But marketing speak claiming high performance is not convincing.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Free for $2,200?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, but they said it was free, they didn't say it was free.

Don't you know the difference between "free" and "free"?

If so, let me explain:

1) Internet Explorer is free, for instance, as you don't pay for it;

2) Internet Explorer is not free because you cannot have its source to modify and make it more secure;

3) Professional distros like Red Hat and Suse are not free because you have to pay to have it;

4) These same professional distros are free because you can compile the source yourself whenever you can.

Got it? If you don't understand this, you'll might believe next time someone says "Linux is not free". Don't be fooled! It is free!

Now, the relevant quote is:

"We're looking for people help us work on this project so we can eventually get it included into the Linux kernel. Comments, suggestions, patches, and testers are more than welcome."

See the part that mentions "get it included into the Linux kernel"? It means it will be free.

Now, these superb guys at RH really should charge for a professional product with support. Soon, very soon, they might discover they must do what Sun does: have a personal low cost (maybe gratis) version, so that people can tweak it, use at home, report bugs etc.

I, for one, thank them for all the fish and get the message that everyone must contribute, no matter how little, and not just wait for them to make things for us.

And don't use English to discuss such things. Or, better yet, change English so that it becomes fit for use. I suggest stop using free to mean gratis. Just use gratis, like in "There's no gratis lunch".

Re:Isnt free. So why do I care?

[GregChant]

Contrary to popular belief the world is not nurb432-centric. Many other people (including myself) care about SANs, and can afford a small licensing fee (2200 USD is small compared to other solutions like XSan, which is 5000 USD, but as other people have said, if you want it for free, you can download the source, just forget any level of support).

I'm sorry you're not exposed to ERP and enterprise-level work, but many of us are. Slashdot's plugs are not exclusively for free-as-in-beer projects.

Re:Redhat vs. Novell

[Sunspire]

Don't go down that road... Red Hat's contibutions to Linux absolutely dwarf SuSE's to date in no uncertain terms.

But let's just focus on the most recent efforts of both companies. Realistically no distro is going to include Yast, but it's still a very good move since it will allow SuSE ISO images to be distributed without the existing restricitions in the future and I'm thankful to Novell for it. On the other hand, Red Hat buying Sistina for $31 million and setting their arguably only asset GFS free and then working on including it in the Linux kernel proper directly also benefits Novell and other Linux distributors.

"lately has been locking down their Linux offerings"? How about giving some concrete examples. Last time I checked RHEL was 100% open source and available for download, and so is Fedora Core for the home user. SuSE has been cleaning up their act since they got purchased by Novell, but to play them against Red Hat, who has been completely 100% behind open source since day one, as somehow a more free alternative is laughable.

Re:Good Distributed Filesystems?

[RAMMS+EIN]

Indeed, GFS is not a networked filesystem like those I have been mentioning. Call my post off-topic if you want, but this is the closest topic that has come up on /. in a long time, that's why I posted here.

Also, I did not mean to suggest that cooking up a distributed filesystem with good consistency and performance is easy, just that, seeing how long people have been at it, I would expect the state of the art to be a lot better than it is now. It's not like distributed filesystems aren't useful, so there should be some demand.

The problems that face a distributed filesystem are well known, and solutions can be found in any good book on distributed (file)systems. Still, the filesystems that we have today either don't implement these solutions, or have buggy/incomplete implementations. That's what bugs me.

Too lazy to check

[Etyenne]

I am too lazy to check myelf, so I'll ask the collective : does GFS support locking and mmap() ? I am asking because this is a sine qua non condition to run my favorite mail server, Cyrus imapd. Redundant high-availability servers are one of the most asked for scenario. And no, Cyrus Murder don't cut it (it solve a different problem, that is scalability).