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.

There is also bug 21524 which outlines how the server core kernel patches could 
be removed.  By removing the core kernel and ldiskfs patches, there would no 
longer be a strong link between the Lustre code and the particular kernel 
version that was being used on the server, just like there is no longer a 
strong link on the client.  However, given the ever-changing nature of the 
kernel APIs I think there will always be an ongoing need to maintain the Lustre 
code to work with the latest kernels.

Bug 21635 describes how to remove/cleanup patches to the ldiskfs code.  We hope 
to work on these patches incrementally, either by changing the Lustre code to 
remove the need for the patch, or by submitting the patch upstream.  However, 
external assistance is always welcome.

> 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.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Lustre Technical Lead
Oracle Corporation Canada Inc.

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