[Lustre-discuss] Patchless server

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 22:06 -0500, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> 
> I appreciate the effort ;)

:-)

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

Good to hear.

> All this effort in packaging and QA problems

I wondering what QA problems you are referring to.

> seems to kinda be something
> that would just go away with a patchless server though.

True enough, some amount of packaging effort would go away with
patchless server support.  Patchless server support doesn't really do
anything to make QA any easier though.

But ultimately, at least currently, a patchless server would have a
significant performance impact.  Most of our customers, as much as they
would like a patchless server, appreciate the performance gains that can
be made for the patched kernel (on what should be a dedicated server
anyway).

> Which I think
> leads back to having good documentation on what each patch in the set is
> for,

Sure.  In an ideal world where there were no resource limitations.

> and what issues it has in getting merged into upstream kernel.org.

You can probably dig into lkml for that.  Rest assured, we have tried,
more than once in the past from what I understand and were met with and
tried to work through various objections each time.  I won't attempt to
even give opinions on why those attempts were blocked as I was not at
all involved in the effort.  But we've been there and done that.

b.