[Lustre-devel] [wc-discuss] Important changes to libcfs primitives usage.

Alexey Lyahkov alexey_lyashkov at xyratex.com
Wed Dec 19 04:32:11 PST 2012


That is second question, 
how we plan maintain a stable version to build with older kernels from RHEL, SuSe and may be Debian.
how WC have plan to sync changes between stable tree and development in kernel?
what they will planed in case huge API changes? as example that change - splice API was added in 2.6.20 kernel and sendfile API was killed - so we should lost all kernels with sendfile support (RHEL5, SLES9/10).
Same for page fault API - they have 3 versions between 2.6.21 and 2.6.26 - so old kernels will be also killed from support.
or we will have never tested code in 'stable' tree.

reason to use autoconf macroses - we can't trust a RHEL/SuSe kernel version/


On Dec 19, 2012, at 04:12, Prakash Surya wrote:
>>> ]unning.
>>> That won't be an issue with Lustre, but you get the idea.
>> 
>> So let me just confirm I understand your issue here.  For example, the
>> Linux kernel is at 3.12.1 (version numbers are purely hypothetical and
>> far into the future) which has Lustre 2.6.3 in it.  But RHEL 9's kernel
>> is only 3.8.1"ish" and has Lustre 2.4.2 (because that's what was in the
>> upstream Linux 3.8.1 kernel) in it.
>> 
>> The complaint is that the Lustre (2.4.2) that's in the RHEL 9 kernel
>> that you are using is too old for some reason?
>> 
>> So what's the remedy?  You can either (a) download the stand-alone
>> Lustre module source for the version of Lustre you need and build it
>> against the RHEL 9 kernel you want to use (assuming they are near enough
>> to be compatible -- which is the same situation that exists today) or
> 
> That is a big assumption, and is most likely false. Currently autoconf
> maintains the compatibility of Lustre with the different kernel versions.
> If the client is in tree, are we really going to maintain the same level
> of autoconf "foo" to be compatible with older kernels? And if not, we
> would have to maintain a second package, outside of the kernel, which did
> have this autoconf compatibility layer.
> 
> I don't think option (a) is the same as what we have now.
> 
> -- 
> Cheers, Prakash
> 
>> (b) you download the entire upstream kernel that has the version of
>> Lustre that you want to use and build that.
>> 
>> It seems to me that (a) is what everyone already has to do all of the
>> time today anyway (assuming the binary RPM that we ship for the given
>> vendor kernel is not new enough) and (b) just isn't even possible so
>> that's gravy.
>> 
>> There might be something obvious that I'm missing, but I'm failing to
>> see how having Lustre (client) in the kernel is any worse than the
>> status quo (basically scenario (a) above) and indeed should provide
>> Lustre compatibility to the current stable Linux sooner than we can
>> typically turn it around.  
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> b.
>> 

----------------------------------------------
Alexey Lyahkov
alexey_lyashkov at xyratex.com





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