On 12/5/06, John R. Dunning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: "Daniel van Ham Colchete" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 21:55:12 -0200 [...] Lustre uses a lot of kernel features that if not enabled will cause the kernel to crash. [...] I don't think that's true.I've been running lustre on assorted kernels, mostly under gentoo dists, for some months, and found that once you get past the installation issues, it's pretty trouble free. Now, note the caveats there: The installation issues are non-trivial, mostly because lustre is very intrusive into the vfs layer. This causes no end of headaches integrating with various other peoples' kernel patches, due to collisions with the other peoples' patches to vfs. That statement is as true of gentoo as it is of any kernel other than the few for which they supply canned patchsets. But I've never seen anything in there that contitutes using a kernel feature which causes the kernel to crash if not enabled. The closest thing I've seen to that is if you muff the patch merging and end up with an inconsistent patchset, that generally leads to a crash :-}
Well, my first Lustre test was crashing on every 'write' operation. Them I enabled LVM and it worked. I'm using only the vanilla 2.6.12.6 kernel with the lastest 1.4 release. I have another machine with the same kernel that crashes everytime I try to use Lustre over the network, either as a client or as a server. Locally it works perfectly. But I'm still trying to learn it and I think I still have to spend plenty of time studying it :-).
Lustre 1.6 (at least the client end) doesn't even really *require* all those kernel patches, ie they do support the idea of a patchless client.
That's a very good point.
We at sicortex are planning on rolling out a gentoo-based cluster that depends heavily on lustre, so we've spent a fair bit of time banging on it. I'm pretty sure we understand it at this point. We'll know for sure soon :-}
Question: would you use Lustre 1.6 now or you would wait until the official version is out? Question: do you expect in upgrade incopability between the current 1.6 beta and next betas or the official version? Best regards, Daniel Colchete -- [email protected] mailing list
