[Lustre-discuss] Patchless server

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 02:23:27PM -0400, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 12:51 -0500, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> > 
> > While I think I understand why you say this, it very easily can sound 
> > like a monopolistic tactic to sell more Sun hardware. 
> 
> Heh.  I'm not sure I'm going to be able to say anything that will
> convince you otherwise.  But to your points I will say...

I appreciate the effort ;)


> Certainly it would be nice to support everyone's kernels, but we have
> limited resources and our customers have told us what kernels they want
> support for and that's what we support.  You have to appreciate that
> Lustre development costs money to keep going and that money has to come
> from somewhere and currently it's coming from customers who want RHEL
> and SLES kernels.  If there was a business case in supporting
> Debian/Ubuntu kernels, I think we'd be doing it.
> 
> That said, we are proud that Lustre has been able to continue as an Open
> Source development project and as such are happy to see the community
> take up the packaging of Debian/Ubuntu packages in some of the Debian
> distributions for the community user base.
> 
> In addition, IIRC there was an offer made on this list to include some
> amount of Debian/Ubuntu packaging foo in our official source repository
> should somebody want to contribute something.  I don't think anyone has
> stepped up (yet).  I am still hopeful.

I went through the process of installing on Debian a month or two ago.
It seems to work relatively well.

http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php?title=Debian_Install


All this effort in packaging and QA problems seems to kinda be something
that would just go away with a patchless server though. Which I think
leads back to having good documentation on what each patch in the set is
for, and what issues it has in getting merged into upstream kernel.org.