[Lustre-discuss] root on lustre and timeouts

[Daire Byrne]

FYI we have been testing FS-Cache from Redhat (landed in 2.6.30) - http://people.redhat.com/~dhowells/fscache. A common read-only NFS root is cached by the clients to the local disk. Not quite a "diskless" system but a good hybrid between booting entirely from network and booting from the local drive. You can make the NFS lookups a little more lazy with the mount options "actimeo=7200,nocto" (say). It has been working well so far but more testing is required before we go into production. Combined with UnionFS for writes we can network boot desktop machines without users noticing the difference between a local HD install.

I've never tried oneSIS but we use the "buildroot" initrd which uses uclibc and busybox - quite easy to port apps to it (http://buildroot.uclibc.org).

Daire

----- "Brian J. Murrell" <Brian.Murrell at Sun.COM> wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 11:48 -0400, Robin Humble wrote:
> > BTW, as was pointed out in one talk of this years LUG, Lustre 1.8's
> > OSS read cache should help things like root-on-Lustre because small
> > commonly used files will likely be cached in the OSS's and won't
> result
> > in disk accesses.
> 
> Yes, imagine what the ROSS cache can do for 150 clients all booting
> (and
> executing the same scripts/binaries) at the same time.  Imagine what
> the
> OSS disk did/does before the cache.  :-)
> 
> Certainly, I am not without bias, but the feature set of 1.8 looks
> compelling enough to make me want to upgrade my own little "dogfood"
> cluster here to 1.8.  :-)
> 
> b.
> 
> 
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