Linux 4.18 Drops The Lustre File-System
The staging area of the kernel where premature/incomplete kernel code goes has seen over one thousand patches this cycle that amount to 168 thousand lines of new code and 227 thousand lines of code removed. In part for the staging area coming in lighter is the Lustre file-system has been removed.
The Lustre file-system as a reminder is a parallel distributed file-system intended for cluster computing that has been around for a decade and a half. While the Lustre file-system is used by super-computers and other cluster computing setups, Greg Kroah-Hartman as the staging subsystem maintainer has removed the code due to a lack of progress in cleaning up the code-base. The Lustre developers, meanwhile, continue working on their own external tree and just port their code to the in-tree mainline code once in a while.
So for now Lustre users will need to rely upon the out-of-tree kernel code until if/when the code is cleaned up to a state where in the future it would be ready to go into the mainline kernel tree once again. Greg KH has expressed his displeasure with the state of the in-kernel Lustre file-system code going back several years.
Other staging area work includes various driver clean-ups, DebugFS clean-ups, removal of NCPFS/IPX code, and various other coding improvements.
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