Lustre feature releases follow a release train model, with feature releases targeted every six months. Maintenance releases are targeted every three months on the current maintenance branch. Maintenance releases for older maintenance branches are on an as-needed basis.
The HPDD team at Intel invests a huge amount of time and resources into ensuring that every release is of high quality. However, we recognize that many Lustre users would rather run a release that is well-proven in production, and will be supported over a longer time, even if it means foregoing some of the newer features. To meet the needs of these customers, Intel designates a certain release to be its long-term maintenance release stream and produces regular bugfix-only updates for this release stream. These releases are what the majority of Intel's customers choose to run in production. Download the latest maintenance release here. You can find out more detailed information in the Lustre 2.1 Change Log and Lustre 2.4 Change Log.
Intel and the Lustre community are continually developing new features required by future versions of Lustre. Users who want to use these capabilities can access them first in feature releases. Feature releases will also contain all the latest bug fixes from previous releases. Periodically, one of the new feature releases will be designated the new long-term maintenance release stream, though not every feature release will have an associated long-term maintenance release stream. Download the latest feature release here. You can find out more detailed information in the Lustre 2.4 ChangeLog.
The complete set of releases - including the popular 1.8.x maintenance release stream - are also available here.
For the future plans for both maintenance and feature releases, please see the Lustre Roadmap.
For details of development in progress within the Lustre community see the Community Development wiki
Users are encouraged to always run the latest version of e2fsprogs on their servers.
The Lustre-enhanced version of GNU tar is capable of backing up and restoring the Lustre layout for files. This requires that the user specify the --xattr option when backing up and restoring the files. The RHEL6.3 and derivative releases of GNU tar include Lustre specific enhancements, so the separate Lustre-enhanced GNU tar is not needed for those releases.