Getting Lustre upstream

The Lustre filesystem has a long history, some of which intersects with Linux. It was added to the staging tree in 2013, but was bounced out of staging in 2018, due to a lack of progress and a development model that was incompatible with the kernel's. Lustre may be working its way back into the kernel, though. In a filesystem-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Timothy Day and James Simmons led a discussion on how to get Lustre into the mainline.

Lustre 文件系统拥有悠久的历史，其中一部分与 Linux 有交集。它在 2013 年被添加到 staging 树中，但由于进展缓慢以及其开发模式与内核不兼容，在 2018 年被移出了 staging。不过，Lustre 可能正在寻找重新进入主线内核的机会。在 2025 年的 Linux 存储、文件系统、内存管理与 BPF 峰会（LSFMM+BPF）上的文件系统专题会议中，Timothy Day 和 James Simmons 主持了一场关于如何将 Lustre 合入主线的讨论。

Day began with an overview of Lustre, which is a "high-performance parallel filesystem". It is typically used by systems with lots of GPUs that need to be constantly fed with data (e.g. AI workloads) and for checkpointing high-performance-computing (HPC) workloads. A file is split up into multiple chunks that are stored on different servers. Both the client and server implementations run in the kernel, similar to NFS. For the past ten or more years, the wire and disk formats have been "pretty stable" with "very little change"; Lustre has good interoperability between different versions, unlike in the distant past where both server and client needed to be on the same version.

Day 首先介绍了 Lustre，这是一种“高性能并行文件系统”。它通常用于拥有大量 GPU 的系统，这些 GPU 需要持续不断地获取数据（例如 AI 工作负载），也用于高性能计算（HPC）负载的检查点保存。一个文件会被分成多个块，分别存储在不同的服务器上。客户端和服务器的实现都在内核中运行，类似于 NFS。在过去十多年里，Lustre 的网络协议和磁盘格式“相当稳定”，几乎没有变化；它在不同版本之间具有良好的互操作性，这与早期服务器和客户端必须运行相同版本的情况相比有了明显改善。

The upstreaming project has been going on for a long time at this point, he said. A fork of the client was added to the staging tree and resided there for around five years before "it got ejected, essentially due to insufficient progress". It was a "bad fit" for the kernel, since most developers worked on the out-of-tree version, rather than what was in staging.

他说，将 Lustre 合入主线的工作已经进行了很长一段时间。客户端的一个分支曾被添加到 staging 树中，并在其中停留了大约五年，最终“由于进展不足而被移除”。它与内核并不“契合”，因为大多数开发者都在维护树外版本，而不是 staging 中的