[lustre-discuss] 1.8 client on 3.13.0 kernel

[Lewis Hyatt]

Hello-

We have a working 1.8 lustre cluster with which we are very happy. The object 
and metadata servers are running one of the recommended CentOS distributions 
(5.4), but the clients are all Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with kernel 2.6.32. It is not 
feasible for us to change on the client side to a different distro other than 
Ubuntu, but we are about to go to Ubuntu 14, with kernel 3.13.0, for reasons 
unrelated to lustre. Unfortunately it seems that lustre 1.8 cannot be built on 
this kernel, we can't even get through the configure process without a large 
number of errors. The first one we hit is this:

checking for /lib/modules/3.13.0-63-generic/build/include/linux/autoconf.h... no

But various attempts to hack around the errors as they come up have not led to 
much success. Is this something we can hope to achieve? I thought I saw some 
threads about a series of patches to support this kernel in lustre 1.8 but I 
haven't been able to find anything conclusive. We are really hoping it is 
possible to upgrade our clients without touching the lustre servers, as we 
don't want to disturb that production system which has been very reliable for 
us, and we don't have much in-house expertise with lustre or CentOS. We were 
able to build a newer lustre client on the 3.13 kernel, but it seems it is not 
willing to interact with the 1.8 servers.

Thanks for any advice, much appreciated.

-Lewis