RE: [Gluster-devel] glusterfs as root filesystem

[Christopher Hawkins]

I use PXE and grab it over the network... No local disk at all. Which leads
me to a question for the gluster team: One thing I was hoping to implement
was local caching, where I can take say a 20 MB ramdisk and have it solely
for caching glusterfs reads. I've heard some chatter about this on the list,
but is that something you are planning for a certain release? 

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On
Behalf Of Jacques Mattheij
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 9:25 AM
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Gluster-devel] glusterfs as root filesystem

excellent trick Christopher ! It's quite close to what live distributions
use to boot from CD (such as knoppix).

Where does your 'initrd' image live ? I'm assuming that you have some kind
of local storage for that or do you fetch it across the network somehow ?

  Jacques Mattheij

Christopher Hawkins wrote:
> whitelistentry: gluster
> I took a slightly different approach and it works well so far... First 
> you need an initrd with the gluster executables and libraries, which I 
> make and update with this script:
> 
> #!/bin/bash
> #
> PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin
> #
> TROOT=/root/initrd_root
> #
> # Update executables
> for i in `find /sbin -iname "*gluster*"`
>   do cp -vf $i $TROOT/bin/
> done
> # Update libraries
> for i in `find /lib -iname "*gluster*"`
>   do cp -vf $i $TROOT/lib/
> done
> # Rsync lib dir
> rsync -av /lib/glusterfs/* $TROOT/lib/glusterfs/ # exit 0
> 
> Then you put everything else you need in the initrd and tar it up / 
> compress it, boot it, and have it modprobe fuse and glusterfs -f 
> /somefile_in_initrd /some_local_dir. What I do first though, is have 
> init build a few partitions in ram and format them ext2, then mount 
> glusterfs and copy some common stuff into the ramdisks (which are 
> really the root, not gluster) and create symlinks to the 
> subdirectories in the glusterfs filesystem. And this seems to run 
> Centos no problem... Gluster guys, any comments on a better way to do
this? It works great, but I imagine it could optimized for speed...
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden
> [mailto:address@hidden
> ] On Behalf Of Matthias Albert
> Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 4:06 AM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [Gluster-devel] glusterfs as root filesystem
> 
> Hi,
> 
> has anyone tried using glusterfs as  root fs?
> 
> We are using openqrm as deployment/management system for our servers here.
> With openqrm we can deploy both native machines and e.g. xen images. 
> As root Filesystem we are currently using NFS which isn't really fast.
> 
> Because we're using glusterfs for our backups and also for our 
> Samba/NFS Server it is close to use it also as root filesystem for our xen
images.
> 
> I think the only thing we need is fuse in a initrd and the glusterfs 
> binary with the needed shared object files.
> 
> Any helpful suggestions?
> 
> Regards,
> 
>   Matthias
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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