[Lustre-discuss] Future of lustre 1.8.3+

[Andreas Dilger]

I've used a SLES kernel on an FC install for a long time on my home  
system. With newer distros there are also fewer changes to the base  
kernel, so there shouldn't be as much trouble to use e.g. the SLES 11  
SP1 kernel (2.6.32) when it is released.

Cheers, Andreas

On 2010-05-19, at 6:01, Heiko Schröter <schroete at iup.physik.uni-bremen.d 
e> 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 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.
>
>>
>>> 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.
>
> I know. But the patches are missing for 1.41.10 in that repo. i.e.  
> as this here "e2fsprogs-1.41.6.sun1-patches.tgz"
>
> Thanks very much for your help.
> Regards
> Heiko