Lustre File System Removes in Linux 4.18 Kernel

During the Linux 4.18 maintenance cycle, the kernel staging area received more than a thousand patches, a total of 168,000 new lines of code appeared, and 227,000 lines of code were deleted. In order to make the kernel buffer area lighter, the Lustre file system has been removed in this change.

The Lustre file system is a parallel distributed file system for cluster computing that has been in existence for fifteen years. Although supercomputers and other cluster computing setups use the Lustre file system, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the temporary subsystem, deleted Lustre’s code due to lack of progress in cleaning up the code base. At the same time, Lustre developers continue to work on their own external trees.

Lustre users now need external dependencies to use Lustre until Lustre can re-enter the state of the mainline kernel tree. Greg KH has expressed his dissatisfaction with the state of the kernel Lustre file system code years ago.

Other kernel staging areas include various driver cleanups, DebugFS cleanup, removal of NCPFS/IPX code, and various other encoding improvements.

Source: Phoronix