The mounting of a file system
GPFS file systems are mounted by using the GPFS mmmount command.
On AIX® or Linux®,
you can also use the operating system's mount command. GPFS mount processing builds the structures required to
provide a path to the data and is performed on both the node requesting the mount and the file system manager node. If there is no file system manager, a call
is made to the cluster manager, which appoints one. The file system manager ensures that the file
system is ready to be mounted. The file system manager ensures that each of the following is true:
- There are no conflicting utilities being run by the mmfsck command, which checks and repairs a file system.
- There are no conflicting utilities being run by the mmcheckquota command, which checks file system user, group and fileset quotas.
- All of the disks are available.
- Any necessary file system log processing is completed to ensure that metadata on the file system is consistent.
On the local node, the control structures required for a mounted file system are initialized and the token management function domains are created. In addition, paths to each of the disks that make up the file system are opened. Part of mount processing involves unfencing the disks, which might be necessary if this node was previously failed. This is done automatically without user intervention. If insufficient disks are up, the mount fails. That is, in a replicated system if two disks are down in different failure groups, the mount fails. In a non-replicated system, one disk down causes the mount to fail.