With all the excitement around the recent Lustre 2.1 release it would be easy to forget that the majority of production Lustre sites are still running Lustre 1.8.x releases. Lustre 1.8.x is still Whamcloud’s designated maintenance release stream and we have just issued our latest bugfix release – Lustre 1.8.7-wc1.
This release removes the potential for a deadlock in mds_open, ensures that group quotas are enforced, and enables ext4 features by default. It also serves those with an eye on the future by fixing a number of interoperability issues with Lustre 2.1 so Lustre 1.8.7-wc1 will provide the best user experience for 1.8.x clients connecting to 2.x servers.
The release is available for download from the Whamcloud download site and you can read fuller details of the release content in the changelog.
Our next maintenance release will be at the end of January. We will determine over the coming weeks whether it will be 1.8.8-wc1 or 2.1.1. Rest assured that even if we do elect to make a 2.1.1 release (and if we don’t switch to a 2.x maintenance release stream in January we certainly will at some point in 2012) that this will not affect our 1.8.x support offering. We have no plans to deprecate support for Lustre 1.8.x and plan to support our customers on this release well beyond the originally published EOL date of June 2012.
Peter is the Support Manager at Whamcloud - a role that he has formerly served for the Lustre teams at CFS, Sun and Oracle. He was the release manager for the Lustre 2.1 release and for numerous 1.6.x and 1.8.x Lustre releases over the years. He lives in BC, Canada.