[Lustre-discuss] Patchless server

[Andreas Dilger]

On Oct 10, 2008  22:06 -0500, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> 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.

Whether the kernel is patched or not is almost irrelevant to the testing
of Lustre.  Yes, it's true that there are sometimes bugs in our kernel
patches, but I don't think that makes up an significant portion of our
testing efforts.

As for a patchless kernel, I recently did an analysis of our server
patches, and it seems possible that we could remove kernel patches
with Lustre 2.0 if development effort is put in that direction.  As
yet, this hasn't been a priority from any of our customers, so it by
necessity takes a back seat to implementing other features they are
interested in.  That doesn't mean it won't happen, but rather on an
"as possible" basis.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.