[Lustre-discuss] Future of lustre 1.8.3+

[Andreas Dilger]

On 2010-05-19, at 01:40, Heiko Schröter wrote:
> we would like to know which way lustre is heading.
> 
>> From the s/w repository we see that only redhat and suse ditros seems to be supported.
> 
> Is this the official policy of the lustre development to stick to (only) these two distros ?

On the client side, we will support the main distros that our customers are using, namely RHEL/OEL/CentOS 5.x (and 6.x after release), and SLES 10/11.  We make a best-effort attempt to have the client work with all client kernels, but since our resources are limited we cannot test kernels other than the supported ones.  I don't see any huge demand for e.g. an officially-supported Ubuntu client kernel, but there has long been an unofficial Debian lustre package.

On the server side, we will continue to support RHEL5.x and SLES10/11 for the Lustre 1.8 release, and RHEL 5.x (6.x is being worked on) for the Lustre 2.x release.  Since maintaining kernel patches for other kernels is a lot of work, we do not attempt to provide patches for other than official kernels.  However, there have in the past been ports of the kernel patches to other kernels by external contributors (e.g. FC11, FC12, etc) and this will hopefully continue in the future.

There is also bug 21524 which outlines how the server core kernel patches could be removed.  By removing the core kernel and ldiskfs patches, there would no longer be a strong link between the Lustre code and the particular kernel version that was being used on the server, just like there is no longer a strong link on the client.  However, given the ever-changing nature of the kernel APIs I think there will always be an ongoing need to maintain the Lustre code to work with the latest kernels.

Bug 21635 describes how to remove/cleanup patches to the ldiskfs code.  We hope to work on these patches incrementally, either by changing the Lustre code to remove the need for the patch, or by submitting the patch upstream.  However, external assistance is always welcome.

> If not, then the sun src patches are still missing in the lustre AND e2fsprogs branches.

I'm not sure what you mean.  The e2fsprogs patches have always been in a separate repository from the core Lustre code, and all of the Lustre/ldiskfs kernel patches are in the Git repository.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Lustre Technical Lead
Oracle Corporation Canada Inc.