[lustre-discuss] 1.8 client on 3.13.0 kernel

[Martin Hecht]

Hi Lewis,

Yes, for lustre 2.x you have to "upgrade" the OS, which basically means
a reinstall of a CentOS 6.x (because there is no upgade path across
major releases), then install the lustre packages and the lustre-patched
kernel, and then the pain begins.
We had a lot of trouble when we upgraded our lustre file systems from
1.8 to 2.4. I would recommend to consider a fresh install of lustre 2 on
a separate hardware, then migrate the data (1.8 clients are able to
mount lustre 2 file systems, but not the other way round, and for
working quota support you need 1.8.9) to the new file system, and
finally reformat the old file system with lustre 2 and use it for
testing or backups or whatever.
However, if buying new hardware is not an option, the upgrade is
possible, and depending on the history of the file system it might work
quite smoothly. Upgrading a freshly formatted lustre 1.8 with some
artificial test data worked without any problems in our tests before
doing the upgrade of the production file systems.

Regards,
Martin


On 09/08/2015 08:18 PM, Lewis Hyatt wrote:
> Thanks a lot for the response. Seems like we need to explore upgrading
> the servers. Do you happen to know how smooth that process is likely
> to be? We have lustre 1.8.8 on CentOS 5.4 there, I presume we need to
> upgrade the OS and then follow the upgrade procedure in the lustre
> manual, maybe it isn't such a big deal. Thanks again...
>
> -Lewis
>
> On 9/8/15 11:16 AM, Patrick Farrell wrote:
>> Lewis,
>>
>> My own understanding is you are out of luck - the 1.8 client cannot
>> realistically be brought forward to newer kernels.  Far too many
>> changes over too long a period.
>>
>> As far as version compatibility, I believe no newer clients will talk
>> to servers running 1.8.  If any will, they would be very early 2.x
>> versions, which won't support your desired kernel versions anyway.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Patrick
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> From: lustre-discuss [lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org] on
>> behalf of Lewis Hyatt [lhyatt at gmail.com]
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2015 9:06 AM
>> To: lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
>> Subject: [lustre-discuss] 1.8 client on 3.13.0 kernel
>>
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> lustre-discuss mailing list
>> lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
>> http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org
>>
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