To compile Hadoop Mapreduce next following, do the following: Step 1) Install dependencies for yarn See http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hadoop/common/trunk/hadoop-mapreduce-porject/hadoop-yarn/README Make sure protbuf library is in your library path or set: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib Step 2) Checkout svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hadoop/common/trunk Step 3) Build Go to common directory - choose your regular common build command. For example: export MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx512m mvn clean package -Pdist -Dtar -DskipTests -Pnative You can omit -Pnative it you don't want to build native packages. Step 4) Untar the tarball from hadoop-dist/target/ into a clean and different directory, say YARN_HOME. Step 5) Start hdfs To run Hadoop Mapreduce next applications: Step 6) export the following variables to where you have things installed: You probably want to export these in hadoop-env.sh and yarn-env.sh also. export HADOOP_MAPRED_HOME= export HADOOP_COMMON_HOME= export HADOOP_HDFS_HOME= export YARN_HOME=directory where you untarred yarn export HADOOP_CONF_DIR= export YARN_CONF_DIR=$HADOOP_CONF_DIR Step 7) Setup config: for running mapreduce applications, which now are in user land, you need to setup nodemanager with the following configuration in your yarn-site.xml before you start the nodemanager. yarn.nodemanager.aux-services mapreduce.shuffle yarn.nodemanager.aux-services.mapreduce.shuffle.class org.apache.hadoop.mapred.ShuffleHandler Step 8) Modify mapred-site.xml to use yarn framework mapreduce.framework.name yarn Step 9) cd $YARN_HOME Step 10) bin/yarn-daemon.sh start resourcemanager Step 11) bin/yarn-daemon.sh start nodemanager Step 12) bin/yarn-daemon.sh start historyserver Step 13) You are all set, an example on how to run a mapreduce job is: cd $HADOOP_MAPRED_HOME ant examples -Dresolvers=internal $HADOOP_COMMON_HOME/bin/hadoop jar $HADOOP_MAPRED_HOME/build/hadoop-mapreduce-examples-0.23.0-SNAPSHOT.jar randomwriter -Dmapreduce.job.user.name=$USER -Dmapreduce.clientfactory.class.name=org.apache.hadoop.mapred.YarnClientFactory -Dmapreduce.randomwriter.bytespermap=10000 -Ddfs.blocksize=536870912 -Ddfs.block.size=536870912 -libjars $YARN_HOME/modules/hadoop-mapreduce-client-jobclient-0.23.0-SNAPSHOT.jar output The output on the command line should be almost similar to what you see in the JT/TT setup (Hadoop 0.20/0.21)