Dear All, I hope that this is the right place to post our feature request of Lustre file system.
Currently Lustre file system with ldiskfs backend server has to compiled with specified Linux kernel versions of RedHat, or SuSE, or other distributions which we haven't tried. But this is very inconvenient and very painful to other distribution e.g. Debian users. So our request is: Whether it is possible to have future releases of Lustre file system with ldiskfs backend server ported to vanilla Linux kernel ? https://www.kernel.org/ Our reason is the following: 1. Our cluster environments are a bit complicated. We need Lustre file system, Infiniband drivers and software, Fibre driver for external storages, and almost newest CUDA driver for GPU computing. Hence most likely we cannot use the precompiled packages to install our clusters. Therefore, we decide to build Linux kernel, CUDA driver, Infiniband driver, and Lustre file system from source code, and try to get them work together. 2. We often choose vanilla Linux kernel as our source, because it is easier to switch, maintain, and available. Actually we cannot always use the newest release because sometimes the kernel Fibre driver may have abnormal problems (we did encounter these abnormalities several times). 3. Among all these, the most challenge part is building Lustre file system with ldiskfs server. Although we can build with patchless kernel, but ldiskfs itself is highly depending on the Ext4 source code of kernel. The build often failed at the source code patches in the very earily stage. We have done many times tring to figure out the conflicts of the patches, modify kernel source codes and patch files based on our best guesses, which of course is highly risky since we don't know whether our modification would break important functions or not. 4. We also tried to get the compatible Linux kernel source to build and run under Debian, e.g., SuSE Linux kernels. But these kernels are hardly to find, especially Lustre often referred to specifiec versions. Further, RedHat kernel often cannot be compiled under Debian, because of the gcc version and feature problems. Therefore, we are really hope that Lustre file system with ldiskfs could have porting to the vanilla Linux kernel. They are very easily available, very actively developped and updated. Actually, there are several "longterm" maintained series, like 4.4.XXX, 4.9.XXX, 4.14.XXX, etc. We would suggest that Lustre development team can target on a few "longterm" maintained series for the porting. For example, for a specific release of Lustre, it can target on, say, 4.4.250, 4.9.250, and 4.14.181. Then that would be very enough and appreciate for our usage. Best Regards, T.H.Hsieh _______________________________________________ lustre-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org
