Re: [gentoo-cluster] examples of (large) Gentoo clusters

[Daniel van Ham Colchete]

On 12/5/06, John R. Dunning <jrd@××××××××.com> wrote:
>     From: "Daniel van Ham Colchete" <daniel.colchete@×××××.com>
>     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
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