I'm a little new to Lustre; my site manages a fair bit of data ... around 10 PB ... mostly now in NFS and we'd like to investigate using Lustre in our environment as a longer-term strategy for improved performance, availability and so on.

However, our cluster runs entirely on Ubuntu Linux as a standard ... we're using 12.04 LTS right now in production with a house-build 3.4.61 kernel, however, I'm doing my Lustre experiments on Ubuntu 14 with the stock 3.13 kernel, source from Ubuntu's archives, just trying to follow the directions in Section 30 of the Lustre manual.

Now, it's just not clear to me ... it looks like most of the packages and directions out there ... are for Red Hat ... I've been looking through the bug tracker and I see people discussing building Lustre on Debian or Ubuntu ... I don't know if this is just the client they are trying to build; I see a few tickets i.e. LU-5189 ... that imply that Lustre will run on Debian and derived platforms like Ubuntu ... but I don't have a good source anywhere that really walks through the build process ...

However if I go and look at /home/build/lustre-release/lustre/kernel_patches or any of the files there under i.e. the "series" subdirectory ... I see nothing for Ubuntu, or Debian ... and a lot of what is there is for old 2.6.x RHEL and SLES kernels, or much lower revisions on the 3.x kernel train for same...

So I suppose my questions are ...

1. Is it possible to build the server-side components of Lustre on Ubuntu 14?

b. If so, does anyone have a source on any snippets of documentation, or a patch set, or information on how I can generate one of these patch series for the 3.13 kernel in Ubuntu 14 LTS?

2. I assume it's at least possible to run Ubuntu 14 LTS as a Lustre client?

b. If so, is there any source for any direction on same?

I suppose I would be willing to build the Lustre MGS/MDS and OSS machines with Fedora if I had to but it's pretty critical to have client support at least for Ubuntu machines ...that's possible, right?

I see some cursory description of a Debian style Lustre build process in ticket LU-1706 but I don't see how it relates to the kernel ... should I just ... I haven't tried to just blindly follow that process; is that basically what I'm looking to do? There's support enough for 3.13 that ./configure will figure it out, so long as all the proper development packages are installed?

So far I've got my Ubuntu kernel source in place; I've grabbed Lustre from Git; I ran autogen.sh per the documentation; now I'm at the stage where I need to patch and build the kernel and it's just not clear to me from the Lustre documentation or anything on the Ubuntu site, or just cursorily Googling around, what the next step is here to get the patches in and the build done...

I have a "/lib/modules/3.13.0-53-generic/kernel/drivers/staging/lustre/lustre/llite/lustre.ko module sitting around on my basically stock Ubuntu 14 machine but searching for Lustre in apt doesn't give me much back ... it looks like there might be some nominal Lustre support in Ubuntu 14 but unclear what version or to what degree ... hopefully someone here can help me make sense of it all?

TIA,

Sean