The GFS2 filesystem is a symmetric cluster filesystem designed to provide a high performance means of sharing a filesystem between nodes. This paper will give an overview of GFS2's make subsystems, features and differences from GFS1 before considering more recent developments in GFS2 such as the new on-disk layout of journaled files, the GFS2 metadata filesystem, and what can be done with it, fast & fuzzy statfs, optimisations of readdir/getdents64 and optimisations of glocks (cluster locking). Finally, some possible future developments will be outlined.

To get the most from this talk you will need a good background in the basics of Linux filesystem internals and clustering concepts such as quorum and distributed locking.

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