[Lustre-discuss] Mounting Lustre as an ext3 partition

Brian J. Murrell Brian.Murrell at Sun.COM
Wed May 13 05:11:48 PDT 2009


On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 11:13 +0200, Nick Jennings wrote:
> 
>  I just wanted to check if there would be problems with mounting a
> Lustre filesystem as ext3 and reading/writing to it.

It probably won't mount as ext3 as it's likely not compatible enough
with ext3 any more.  ext4 if you have that perhaps, but better to just
use ldiskfs which is it's native format.

> Would there be any
> corruption or other unwanted effects to the data integrity?

Not just by mounting it.  Of course, if you start fiddling with it's
contents, you could cause damage to the coherency of the overall Lustre
filesystem.

>  If we encounter any issues with Lustre, a backup plan would be to mount
> the volume as ext3 and serve the files (for example via NFS) as a
> temporary solution in an emergency.

No, that won't work.  You have to remember that a Lustre filesystem
separates the metadata (filenames, attributes, etc.) from the file data
and puts the former on the MDT and the latter on OSTs.  Only Lustre can
bring these back together to form a cohesive filesystem again.

b.

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