LWG Minutes 2016-03-23

Attendance
Cray: Cory Spitz, Justin Miller, Chris Horn

ORNL: Sarp Oral, James Simmons

Indiana: Ken Rawlings

Intel: Joe Gmitter, Peter Jones, Richard Henwood, Paul Sathis, Andreas Dilger

Sandia: Ruth Klundt

Actions
New Actions Captured:


 * None

Existing Open Actions:


 * James will do a short write-up on the wiki.lustre.org for how to submit upstream
 * 3/23 Update: James to request account to be able to post on wiki.lustre.org.  James should work with Peter or Joe if his request does not get attention quickly.

Actions Recently Closed:


 * None

Minutes
2.8 Release Status/Update


 * 2.8 is now GA.

2.9 Update

Peter


 * 2.9 landings ongoing.
 * No other open questions or news to report from the group,

LUG Topics


 * Lustre Developer Day @ LUG
 * http://opensfs.org/events/lustre-developer-day/
 * Good turnout for developer day. Currently 45 participants already registered (capacity for 50).

Community Roadmap

Peter


 * While reviewing links on the LUG page, Peter noticed that we have moved away from a published community roadmap.
 * Is it worth reinstating a high level overview of when marquee type features are estimated to be coming along? Is it also worth it to show that development is planned for several years into the future?  Opened to the floor for discussion.
 * Cory: Yes, we should pursue that.  This is important from an advocacy point of view.  We have not moved away from the 5 month train model for releases, if nothing more it would still be beneficial to having the planned release cadence shown on a timeline.
 * Peter: Agreed that not seeing a roadmap is a detriment to advocacy.
 * Sarp: Yes, we should be doing this and supports it.
 * Peter: We can show marquee features and note that it is subject to change.  The current estimation can be displayed and further refined as we approach the next release in the pipeline.
 * Sarp: Would a Q&A at the end of LUG talks be worth it to gather more input on the roadmap?
 * Peter: For this impending LUG, we could add it to the post-LUG survey.  Also, we could put this in the community survey next year and use the data as input for that LUG session.
 * Peter proposes mapping out the the projects from the projects page into future releases as a basis for the start of the roadmap.
 * Cory: Is it too late to have a rough roadmap to present at LUG?
 * Peter was planning to verbally speak to the reintroduction of the roadmap as part of his community update.
 * Peter will rough up a roadmap by the end of the week. Sarp and Cory agreed to review the roadmap to and provide timely comments in the event that a possible update to Peter’s slide deck would be possible prior to LUG.

Upstream Lustre Client

James


 * All functionality of Lnet in 2.8 has been merged into 4.6.RC1. When it comes out, it will be completely compatible with what we have in 2.8.
 * Cory: Do we think this would introduce new users of Lnet?
 * James: David Woodhouse is showing interest in getting it out of staging before the rest of Lustre
 * We are seeing a better turnaround time on patch merging.
 * Cory: Who might be the maintainer of Lnet once out of merging?  Is there someone we have to identify?
 * James: This is a good question and he may be the de facto at this point.
 * Andreas: it would be good to update the maintainers file and include Oleg in it as well.
 * James: Now that Lnet is synced up, would it be possible to explore if it is possible for patches that are landing to be Lnet to be pushed upstream directly by the developer?
 * Peter: Very good question and this is worth further consideration and discussion.
 * Peter: What else would be left after Lnet?
 * James: libcfs (hardest part, lots of style issues to correct), IB driver is a pain to merge because, APIs change so munch in the IB layer with each kernel release (may have to always be manually merged).
 * James: There is one outstanding change to Lnet (LU-7101) that he would to see done before a major tab cleanup occurs.
 * Sarp: Who is helping James in these efforts?
 * Peter: Oleg has been the major contributor from the Intel side, along with some contributions from Dmitry and Andreas.  Ben Evans and Dongyang Li have been involved as well.
 * Peter: When we originally called for help on this some may have thought of it as a far fetched goal.  A new call for action at LUG might yield newfound help.  People can make a large contribution in this space without much Lustre expertise.
 * James: Was planning on talking about this at developer day.

lustre.org

Ken


 * Finished categorizing all the wiki articles.
 * Release info has been added to the front page.
 * If there is any other front page info that anyone thinks is beneficial, please let Ken know.

Other Business


 * The call on 4/6 is cancelled. Next meeting will be in 4 weeks time.

Next meeting will be on 2016-04-20