[Lustre-discuss] Trouble compiling lustre sources

Andreas Dilger adilger at sun.com
Thu Mar 11 11:36:36 PST 2010


On 2010-03-11, at 11:58, Lawrence Sorrillo wrote:
> Lustre 1.8.2 supports 2.6.18-164.11.1.el5 (EL5u4), however, we have  
> 24GB
> on our machine so we use 2.6.18-164.11.1.el5PAE. This also seems to  
> be a problem. I thought that since the 2.6.18-164 was supported  
> getting lustre to
> accommodate the "PAE" would not be difficult, but I have failed to  
> do this.

Why are you running a 32-bit kernel with > 4GB of RAM?  That is a very  
unusual configuration these days, and even besides Lustre it is  
unlikely that many people will be using/testing such a configuration.

Is this for a Lustre client or server usage?

As for Lustre, we have run on 4GB i386 machines in the past with  
highmem, and of course > 4GB x86_64 machines, but I doubt we've ever  
tested with PAE mode.

The main problem with "highmem" systems like this is that the kernel  
is limited to using 1GB of RAM for all allocations (including page  
tables, and such), and applications can only address 4GB of RAM, so  
managing 24GB of RAM becomes a serious problem.  On a server, 23GB of  
your memory would sit unused.  On a client there would be continual  
memory pressure on the lowmem kernel allocations, even if there is  
lots of free highmem available.

> Nicolas Williams wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 01:33:33PM -0500, Lawrence Sorrillo wrote:
>>
>>> I was attempting to create lustre client rpms against a i686 EL5u4  
>>> box.
>>>
>>> (2.6.18-164.11.1.el5PAE #1 SMP Wed Jan 6 13:43:57 EST 2010 i686 i686
>>> i386 GNU/Linux)
>>>
>>> I see that this kernel is not yet officially supported. So I was  
>>> stumped.
>>>
>>> I have since abandoned this attempt and looking to down-rev to  
>>> EL5u3.
>>>
>>
>> Correct, you have to build against a supported kernel.
>>
>> Nico
>>
>
>
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Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.




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