Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC][ATTEND] Merging the Lustre filesystem

[Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>]

Excerpts from Andreas Dilger's message of 2011-02-02 18:46:51 -0500:
> On 2011-02-02, at 07:59, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 03:14:31PM +0100, Johann Lombardi wrote:
> >> In the past, there were ongoing discussions about merging the Lustre code into the kernel, but they failed due to the significant changes required to the kernel at that time.
> > 
> > That's utter nonsense.  The only thing that failed was pushing hooks
> > without in-tree users that would only benefit lustre.  If you're serious
> > about merging Lustre clean up the mess that it is right now and submit
> > it.
> 
> The point is that both the kernel and Lustre have changed enough that kernel patches are no longer needed on the client, and we are working toward removing the kernel patches on the server.  At that point it would be possible to merge Lustre as an isolated (though very large) filesystem.
> 
> > Boring us all with a talk why you might eventually do something to get
> > it merged is not productive.  Instead start the actualy work NOW and let
> > the code speak.
> 
> What we are trying to avoid is changing all of the Lustre code, and two years from now you say "you did this completely wrong, you should do it differently".  Also, there are a bunch of changes/features we have made for ext4 that we want to get merged upstream (large xattrs, stack reduction, multi-mount protection, etc).  Finally, we would like to start using btrfs for a backing filesystem, and we'd like to get some discussion/consensus about the design of those changes so that they can also be accepted upstream.
> 
> If you think you will be bored, you can go to the block/SCSI discussion.

Changes for ext4 and/or btrfs are still interesting, both in a
discussion of the existing patches or pushes for future design work.

-chris