History
Development of GFS began in 1995 and was originally developed by University of Minnesota professor Matthew O'Keefe and a group of students. It was originally written for SGI's IRIX operating system, but in 1998 it was ported to Linux since the open source code provided a more convenient development platform. In late 1999/early 2000 it made its way to Sistina Software, where it lived for a time as an open-source project. Sometime in 2001 Sistina made the choice to make GFS a commercial product — not under an open-source license.
Developers forked OpenGFS from the last public release of GFS and then further enhanced it to include updates allowing it to work with OpenDLM. But OpenGFS and OpenDLM became defunct, since Red Hat purchased Sistina in December 2003 and released GFS and many cluster-infrastructure pieces under the GPL in late June 2004.
Red Hat subsequently financed further development geared towards bug-fixing and stabilization. A further development, GFS2 derives from GFS and was included along with its distributed lock manager (shared with GFS) in Linux 2.6.19. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 included GFS2 as a kernel module for evaluation purposes. With the 5.3 update, GFS2 became part of the kernel package.
As of 2009, GFS forms part of the Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and upwards and associated CentOS Linux distributions. Users can purchase commercial support to run GFS fully supported on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.3, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform has included support for GFS at no additional cost.
The following list summarizes some version numbers and major features introduced:
- v1.0 (1996) SGI IRIX only
- v3.0 Linux port
- v4 journaling
- v5 Redundant Lock Manager
- v6.1 (2005) Distributed Lock Manager
- Linux 2.6.19 - GFS2 and DLM merged into Linux kernel
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 releases the first fully supported GFS2
Read more about this topic: GFS2
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