[Ocfs2-users] Re: Ocfs2-users Digest, Vol 41, Issue 21

[Mark Fasheh]

On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 11:34:02PM +0200, Arjan Widlak wrote:
> If this is an ill-informed question, please enlighten me.

Your question is certainly not ill-informed :)


> I'm following this list for quite some time and have done some tests
> (quite some time ago) and noticed then that if you write from two machines
> to the same file at the same moment, the one that is finished last 'wins'
> i.c. the file contains the content that that machine tried to write.

That's correct and it's by design - the functioning is just as if two local
writes were racing each other.


> I'm reading this list to see when this issue is resolved. Now I'm
> reading this, I thought: let's ask. If cluster aware file-locking is not
> supported, what exactly is the use of a cluster file system? Isn't that
> the most important feature?

There's lots of tasks that people use Ocfs2 for that don't require cluster
aware flock. Looking through the list archives should show up plenty of
examples. Also checking out "supported" uses by Oracle and Novell shows
quite a bit of usefulness there. So no, I wouldn't say that it's necessarily
"the most important" feature.

That said, we all agree that cluster aware flock _is_ important. And surely
there are environments that require it which makes ocfs2 not a suitable file
system yet. So we the developers want to add it but these things take time
and planning and coding :)
	--Mark

--
Mark Fasheh
Senior Software Developer, Oracle
mark.fasheh at oracle.com