examples of (large) Gentoo clusters

    From: Bryan Green <bgreennas.nasa.gov>
    Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:15:54 -0800
    
    "John R. Dunning" writes:
    >     From: Bryan Green <bgreennas.nasa.gov>
    >     
    >     I was able to patch the kernel, but the server
was somewhat unstable.  
    > 
    > Do you remember how it was unstable?  That's the
kind of thing I'd very much
    > like to understand, as we're proposing to depend
heavily on it.  If there are
    > issues, whether specifically tied to our patches or
not, I'd love to know
    > about them.
    
    I remember the system was stable until we tried to shut
it down.  

Ah.  I have observed lustre to get cranky when you try to
boot the system out
from under it.  In particular, if you go to all the servers
and /sbin/shutdown
without first shutting down lustre, I've seen it hang. 
Given the nature of
lustre, that didn't surprise me a lot :-}  The times I've
shut down lustre in
the correct order (shut down clients, then oss's, then mds,
then mgs) it's
always behaved itself.

								      It would lock up while
    shutting down, possibly while unmounting filesystems.  I
also did not get to do extensive
    testing of the system, so I don't know if it would have
been stable under real use of the
    Lustre filesystem.

Ok.  Like I said, I've found a few bugs, but I've never seen
it act unstable
in real use.
    
    >     I also tried to make a custom kernel for
    >     lustre 1.4, but ultimately hit too many
roadblocks.  I did learn a bit about how
    >     to use 'quilt' though.
    >     
    > Hmmm.  Maybe not.  Our stuff ditches quilt.
    
    I just used quilt when working with 1.4.  I did not have
an ebuild for that.
    
I could never get quilt to work so just ditched it.  You
don't need it anyhow,
if you ./configure blah-blah --disable-quilt, it works fine.
 I imagine if you
were doing core development on lustre, in particular trying
to actually build
the large collection of patches they ship with it, quilt
would be handy, but
for just trying to get the kernel patched, my scripts skip
it.
-- 
gentoo-clustergentoo.org mailing list