I studied Lustre last week a little bit and, talking about MDSs and
OSSs, I came with one reason for them not to make Lustre to support
Gentoo: Lustre uses a lot of kernel features that if not enabled will
cause the kernel to crash.

I didn't find any documentation explaning those features but I could
make a list of the orbivious ones: LVM, DM, ext3, ...

I think that even they can't make a list of all those features, that
is why they have to make Lustre available mainly on pre-compiled /
pre-configured kernels. And, thank God, Gentoo doesn't have a
predefined kernel. Although that would make easy for them to change
and distribute it.

What do you think about my ideia?

But that leads to a more generic question: if Linux is always Linux
(the kernel), and the distro is only a way to organize packages, files
and init scripts, why would anyone need restrict an open source
software to a distro? If my first assumption is right, the quicky (but
not necessarily well thought) answer would be: lack of knowledge.

Best,
Daniel Colchete

 -
On 12/4/06, Bryan Green <bgreen@...> wrote:
> I wonder...  They are going to be OS agnostic on the client side when 1.6
> comes out, because of the "patchless client", i.e. the kernel on the client
> side does not need to be patched.
> On the server side, what is missing is a patched gentoo-sources or
> vanilla-sources kernel.  But we know that there is a lustre-kernel ebuild
> out there.  Depending on the issues involved, getting them to support Gentoo
> may just be a matter of getting them to support the lustre-kernel package.
>
> -bryan
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