[LU-7983] Issues building Lustre 2.5.x, 2.6 and 2.7 against RHEL6.5 and MOFED 3.2

• Status: Resolved
• Project: Lustre
• Affects Version/s: Lustre 2.6.0, Lustre 2.7.0, Lustre 2.5.3
• Type: Bug
• Priority: Major
• Reporter: Carlos Thomaz (Inactive)
• Assignee: WC Triage
• Resolution: Won't Fix

Environment

Centos 6.5 (RHEL 6.5) kernel 2.6.32-431.29.2.el6.x86_64
Mellanox OFED 3.2.0 (IB EDR, mlx5_ib)

• Epic/Theme: lustre-2-7, lustre-2.5.3, lustre-2.6.0, ofed3.2, rhel6.5
• Severity: 3

Description

Hi,

We are working on a case where the customer is requiring us to build Lustre against a relatively old kernel (2.6.32-431.29.2.el6) and Mellanox OFED 3.2 drivers.

I'm getting problems running configure that prevents to proceed with the build. I've found couple similar issues (slightly different kernel versions and OFED) such as:
LU-6790
LU-6327
LU-7840

The ./configure stop with the error like the one below:
...
checking whether to use any OFED backport headers... no
checking whether to enable OpenIB gen2 support... no
configure: error: can't compile with OpenIB gen2 headers under /usr/src/compat-rdma

As per one of the threads seems like it's expected to get this error when trying to build Lustre with external OFED for all versions newer than RHEL6.5 and I believe this is what's happening, since I can easily build the using stock ofed (with no glitches). However, I'm still a bit confused about it. I've applied the patches described on the tickets above but with not a lot of success (in some cases the patch simply fails and other cases it get applied but doesn't seems to make any difference).

So, I've tried different options combining Lustre version 2.5.x, 2.6 and 2.7 with the same kernel with and without Mellanox OFED and the conclusion I had is that it will always fail when trying to build Lustre with a non-stock OFED.

So, due the requirements I need to insist in using the Mellanox OFED on this specific distro. At this stage I believe the only variables I can change is the Lustre client (between 2.5.x and 2.6.x) and eventually a smal kernel change.

Could anyone provides me some direction on how to tackle this?

Thank you
Carlos.

Issue Links

• is related to: LU-8401 modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'ln...