[Lustre-discuss] Lustre Solution Delivery

[Brian J. Murrell]

[ this was in my Inbox to respond to but slipped behind the landslide of
e-mail I have gotten recently.  hopefully better late than never. ]

On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 19:05 -0700, Mostyn Lewis wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 17:32 -0600, Sam Bigger wrote:
> ... snip
> 
> > Keep in mind, for RHEL 5 and SLES 10 clients, we support "patchless"
> > mode in which you run lustre modules that are built for the kernel that
> > comes with the vendor's distribution.  No need to build kernels for
> > clients, and in many cases, no need to even build lustre.
> 
> ***
> There must be qualifications here? Are all RHEL 5 and SLES 10 (SPx) up
> to being "patchless" level for clients?

Yes.  In fact, most any kernel beyond about 2.6.15 or 2.6.16 vintage
that has not had invasive patches included such as Ubuntu's recent
kernels with AppArmor.

> Is this really set in stone
> for all levels of future Lustre, too?

As in which versions of Linux the patchless client can be used with?  I
don't know specific obligations and so on, but I would certainly think
that as newer Linux kernel versions are released we will continue to
support them.  I'm not sure how recent we are currently supporting.
Perhaps as recent as 2.6.22.

> Not if you do not supply RDAC (mpp) kernels, too, e.g. for 6140?

Can RDAC not be built as a module external to the kernel build?  IOW,
does RDAC require patching of the kernel?  If it does support building
"out of [kernel] tree" (i.e and does not require patching the kernel)
then you still can use a Sun provided kernel.  You just need to build
RDAC against the also provided source tree.

Perhaps this RDAC module is important enough that the Lustre Group
provides it in or with our kernel builds.  Perhaps not.  I will leave
that up to the business folks to decide.


> > RHEL5 (and thus CentOS 5) comes with an OFED stack included in the OS.
> 
> Old, especially for the linkes of ConnextX/Hermon HCA.

I don't know anything about those devices.  They need OFED do they?
What version works best for them?  What version do you understand to be
in the RHEL5 kernel such that it's too old?

1.6.5 will support and we will supply packages for OFED 1.3 (on servers;
the status of patchless clients is still to be determined).

> You need to supply SRPMS/src too

We do.  We supply both kernel-lustre-source and lustre-source packages.

> as some people (like Hillsboro HPC benchmark)
> need to produce compatible PathScale/INTEL/PGI MPI versions

Again, if these are all external module builds, it doesn't require an
actual binary kernel (re-)build.  Our provided RPMs should suffice along
with the kernel-lustre-source RPMs for building modules against.

>  (and maybe gcc
> if you don't build that per OS/gcc release level).

We use whatever is current on the given OS.

> Also the comments (above) about mpp
> (RDAC) apply - you'd need modules built against that.

Hopefully my comments answer to that too.  If not we can clarify.

b.

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