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

[Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org>]

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John R. Dunning wrote:
>     From: Bryan Green <bgreen@nas.nasa.gov>
> A longer term solution is to do some combination of remodularizing vfs and
> recasting the lustre stuff so as to depend less on getting its fingers into
> the guts.  I once spent some time looking into that, and I do believe it's
> possible, but it would take some work, and would really need to be done in
> concert with the rest of the core kernel guys, and I ran out of time to pursue
> it.  In the meantime, the more the gentoo community can resist the temptation
> to patch the kernel (at least the vfs parts of it), the easier it will be to
> add lustre.

> Based on what you've said, I wouldn't fool around with SLES, I'd just figure
> out what close-to-vanilla kernel you want to start from (picking one you think
> you can live with for a while) and do some part of what I described above.
> You might have a somewhat easier time of it if you started with 2.6.18, as I
> believe there's a cfs-supplied patchset for that one.  If you want to start
> from a gentoo 2.6.18 one, I suspect your task will be to start with vanilla,
> make that work, then work out how to re-apply the gentoo patches.  Re getting
> cfs to help, my bet would be that you'll have an easier time getting the
> gentoo community to create patches that are amenable to going on top of a
> lustre-ized vanilla kernel (and relying on cfs to support vanilla kernels)
> than you will getting cfs to generate patches to go on top of gentoo.  If you
> watch the lustre lists, you'll see more people asking for vanilla than are
> asking for gentoo.

I've just got a couple comments on this.

* The gentoo-sources patches are almost all upstream and based on the
W.X.Y.Z "stable release" patchsets, except for 2-3 cases that probably
aren't relevant to clusters. As a result, Gentoo folks would be
reasonably well off just running vanilla-sources, which groups them in
with everyone else wanting Lustre on a vanilla kernel.

* Normally I would recommend hardened-sources for anything resembling a
server, but you should have all your nodes and file servers blocked off
from the Internet anyway so that's a non-issue.

Thanks,
Donnie


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