Setting up autofs as follows:

$ cat /etc/auto.master
/auto/gfs /etc/auto.glusterfs 
$ cat /etc/auto.glusterfs
simple     -fstype=glusterfs,log-level=DEBUG,log-file=/tmp/g.log               :/etc/glusterfs/simple.vol
$ cat /etc/glusterfs.simple.vol
volume ex0
  type storage/posix
  option directory /tmp/gex0
end-volume

and then firing up automount results in "ls /etc/auto/simple" hanging.

Reproduced on Ubuntu 10.4 and Arch 2010.5.

Glusterfs-vs-autofs problems were noticed long ago. It was found out that the problem is with daemonization -- ie. original glusterfs process terminates prior to mounting completed. With autofs4, it was sufficient to have the original process wait for mounting (cf. commit 7e6c9643); with autofs5, this is not enough, autofs5 wants the process spawned by it to do the mount. 

The refacorization of main() done for dynamic volume management solves this issue nicely, by putting fuse init before daemonization. So in mainline, this is FIXED.

For release-3.0 issue is present, patch is sent to fix it up.

PATCH: http://patches.gluster.com/patch/3890 in release-3.0 (make glusterfs work with autofs5)

Autofs works fine on 3.1 branch. will be closing the bug.