[OSR-devel] GlusterFS Support

[Gordan B. <go...@bo...>]

Hi,

I'm working on adding GlusterFS support for OSR. I know I mentioned this 
months ago, but I've waited until glusterfs is actually stable enough to 
use in production (well, stable enough for me, anyway).

The client-only case will be simple enough, but for a 
client-with-local-storage case, it's a bit more complicated. GlusterFS 
uses a local file system as backing storage. That means that it needs to 
mount a local ext3 file system before mounting the glusterfs volume via 
fuse on top and chroots into it for the 2nd stage boot.

So, I can use the <rootvolume> entry for the glusterfs part, but before 
mounting that as the rootfs, I first have to mount the underlying ext3 
file system as stage 1.5 rootfs.

I'm currently thinking of implementing it by having <chrootenv> contain 
the glusterfs backing store. This would be fine as long as the 
<chrootenv> volume can be considered clobber-safe (i.e. extracting the 
initrd to it won't ever wipe the path (e.g. /gluster/ ) not contained 
within the initrd file structure.

1) Does this sound like a reasonable way to do it?

2) Is it safe to assume that chrootenv won't get silently clobbered? I 
know it doesn't seem to happen, but I'm still a little nervous about it...

Thanks.

Gordan