[Lustre-discuss] Future of lustre 1.8.3+

[Bernd Schubert]

On Wednesday 19 May 2010, Heiko Schröter wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 19 Mai 2010, um 10:33:04 schrieben Sie:
> > 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.
> 
> The server side is the more critical part as we are using gentoo+lustre
>  running a vanilla kernel 2.6.22.19 with the lustre patches version 1.6.6.
>  As far as we are concerned it would be nice to have the pathces for the
>  "vanilla-kernels" in 1.8.3+. This would be just fine.
> 
> On the other hand if maintaining is the key problem on your side what would
>  be a major argument against using a patched sles/rhel on a lustre server

That is what I would recommend and what several groups do (usually with 
Debian, though). 

>  not running the sles/rhel distro ? I know a lot of things can happen but
>  are these rhel/sles patches do brake some key features of the kernel which
>  would  only work under that specific distro ? I've positivley tested a
>  lustre client with a sles patched kernel on a gentoo distro. But i'am a
>  bit nervous about testing it on our live lustre server system.

The only thing that really might cause trouble is udev, since sysfs 
maintainers like to break old udev versions. I think upcoming Debian Squeeze 
requires 2.6.27 at a minimum.


Cheers,
Bernd

-- 
Bernd Schubert
DataDirect Networks