Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS) presents a consistent file system image across the servers in a cluster. OCFS allows administrators to take advantage of a files system for the Oracle database files (data files, control files, and archive logs) and configuration files. This eases administration of the Oracle Real Application Clusters.

OCFS supports Red Hat's AS 2.1 and EL 3.0 kernels, SuSe's SLES8 kernel and the Red Flag DC Server 4.1/ MIRACLE LINUX v3.0 (Asianux Inside) kernel for the i686, ia64 and x86-64 platforms. The full kernel version information is listed in the download pages. Please note that to be supported under the Oracle support contract, Oracle customers must only use the packages supplied in the above links.

The fixes in the various releases are listed in the README.

The user's guide and other information can be found in the documentation section. Please especially read the best practices document for OCFS on Red Hat and SuSe.

The RPMs for direct io (o_direct) enabled standard Linux utilities like cp, tar, etc. can be downloaded from the Coreutils project.

We do not provide OCFS rpms for the ATHLON kernel. However the use of the i686 OCFS modules atop the i686 Linux kernel is supported on the ATHLON.

Please read references to UnitedLinux 1.0, in this website, as SLES8.

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Note: OCFS is not intended to be a POSIX compliant file system, there are no guarantees that timestamp updates or inode changes are similar in behaviour as other filesystems on the same platform or especially on different operating systems. Version 1 is specifically designed for Oracle Database files, create, move, delete and backup. It is well possible that certain OS commands will show different results, this is not considered a malfunction inside ocfs. We try when possible and where possible to stick to standard behaviour with error messages, e.g. ENOSPACE, etc. However, at the minimum, what is required for Oracle to work properly is implemented, anything more is not a guarantee.

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Note
OCFS is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Oracle will only formally support the binary RPM's compiled by Oracle and downloadable for Red Hat Advanced Server or United Linux. The source code for the binaries shipped with the RPM's are directly available in the source RPMS (.src.rpm) for reference and compliance. However, self-compiled objects are unsupported. Use at your own risk. Oracle provides OCFS product support to customers that already have an Oracle support license.