[Lustre-discuss] Support for vanilla kernels in lustre servers

[Bernd Schubert]

On Saturday 31 October 2009, Mag Gam wrote:
> if I were to deploy a system now and I want to do the kernel compile
> way, what kernel do you recommend? I prefer using 1.6.7.2 because of
> its stability...

Sun is very helpful and provide distribution kernels as tar.bz2 on 
their download page:

http://downloads.lustre.org/public/kernels/

So instead of going through the pain to get that yourself from the 
vendors src.rpm Sun already greatly helps (so far I have not 
found an easy how to do that myself, any hint from the guy 
providing the tar files would be highly appreciated).

In a perfect world, this page also would state which kernel is suitable 
for which Lustre version, e.g.

lustre-1.6.7.2	linux-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5.tar.bz2
lustre-1.8.1.1	linux-2.6.18-128.7.1.el5.tar.bz2


Also missing are the .config files. I usually extract these from the kernel 
binary packages - I need to download 150MB to get the 4KB config file *sigh*. 
And better don't try to change options in non-vanilla kernels, this very often 
fails, because the vendor doesn't support it and so also doesn't test it.

Btw, of course these kernels also work for different distributions, so instead 
of going through the pain to port Lustre to  Ubuntu or Debian kernels, I simply 
started to create debian packages for the RHEL5 kernels

http://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/tc/usr/bernd/downloads/lustre/1.6/debs/lustre-clients/1.6.7.2-ddn2/
linux-image-2.6.18-128.7.1.el5_1_amd64.deb
linux-headers-2.6.18-128.7.1.el5_1_amd64.deb


Cheers,
Bernd


PS: Disclaimer: Whatever packages you may find on my home page, I won't 
provide support for these!

-- 
Bernd Schubert
DataDirect Networks