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

[Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org>]

Daniel van Ham Colchete wrote:
> 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?

It really shouldn't be that difficult to add in features until it stops 
crashing, then specify those features as dependencies in the kernel 
build system.

> 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.

Sure. If they offer to support Lustre on a distribution, they need to be 
able to fix problems on that distribution. That means being aware of 
possible distribution-specific interactions that could cause issues and 
also knowing how to deal with them as well as reproduce them locally.

Thanks,
Donnie
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