Release Notes v7.2.12

The BeeGFS 7.2.12 release adds more fine-grained configuration for RDMA connections, Grafana alert functionality and fixes issues with RDMA device removal.

General Changes/Improvements

  • Added a new configuration option connRDMAFragmentSize that can be used to reduce fragmentation of the RDMA buffers used for data transfers between the client and the servers. The default value is 4096, which preserves legacy behavior. We recommend to increase the fragment and buffer sizes for improved RDMA performance and larger connRDMABufSize. Please see the client configuration file for more detailed documentation.

  • Added new configuration options connRDMAMetaBufNum, connRDMAMetaBufSize and connRDMAMetaFragmentSize to enable more fine-grained control over RDMA paramters for connections to meta servers. connRDMAMetaBufNum and connRDMAMetaBufSize default to 0 to preservce legacy behavior, which is to use the same values as storage connections which are defined by connRDMABufNum and connRDMABufSize. connRDMAMetaFragmentSize defaults to 4096, also to preserve legacy behavior. Meta messages are usually much smaller than messages to storage and therefore don’t require as much buffer space. Please refer to the client configuration file for more detailed documentation.

  • Added new example alert configuration to the monitoring framework. Please note that these alerts need to be imported and manually enabled first. Please see the alert setup documentation for a detailed setup and configuration guide.

Fixes

  • Fixed an issue that could lead to client crashes if an IPoIB device went down and caused an RDMA_CM_EVENT_DEVICE_REMOVAL event, which was improperly handled. This fix also adds a periodic rescan of available NICs, which will update the connection pool component and enables it to react to changes in local NIC availability.

  • Some configuration updates and corrections.

Known Issues and Limitations

  • The Metadata daemon does not work reliably on RHEL/CentOS 8 and SLES 15.1 and 15.2 due to a problem in the versions of glibc. The problem was fixed in RHEL/CentOS 8.1 and SLES 15.3.

  • The client module does not compile on SLES 15.2 with Mellanox OFED 5.2

Supported Linux Distributions and Kernels

Packages are provided for the x86_64 architecture and the following distributions:

  • RHEL 7 and 8

  • SLES 15

  • Debian 9 and 10

  • Ubuntu 18

  • Ubuntu 20

  • Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux should now be configured to use the RHEL 8 repository (note the known issue with RoCE and RHEL 8.5 described above)

The following Mellanox OFED driver versions are supported: 5.8, 5.6, 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, 4.9

The full integration test suite was run on CentOS 7.9, RHEL 8.5, Rocky 8.6, Rocky 8.7, Alma 8.5, and Debian 10.

Client build testing:

  • RHEL 7.9: no OFED, OFED 4.9, 5.0, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4

  • RHEL 8.3: no OFED, OFED 4.9, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4

  • AlmaLinux 8.4: no OFED, OFED 5.3, 5.4

  • AlmaLinux 8.5: no OFED, OFED 5.3, 5.4, 5.5

  • AlmaLinux 8.7: no OFED, OFED 5.8

  • Rocky Linux 8.4: no OFED, OFED 5.3, 5.4

  • Rocky Linux 8.5: no OFED, OFED 5.5

  • Rocky Linux 8.6: no OFED, OFED 5.6

  • Rocky Linux 8.7: OFED 5.8

  • Rocky Linux 8.8: no OFED, OFED 5.8

  • SLES 15.1: no OFED, OFED 5.0

  • SLES 15.2: no OFED, OFED 5.1, 5.4

  • SLES 15.3: no OFED, OFED 5.4, 5,5, 5.6

  • Debian 9: no OFED, 5.4

  • Debian 10: no OFED, OFED 5.2, 5.3, 5.4

  • Ubuntu 18: no OFED

  • Ubuntu 20: no OFED, OFED 5.4

Version Interoperability

BeeGFS v7.2.12 is compatible with BeeGFS 7.2.x.

Upgrading from Older Versions

To upgrade from an older version, please refer to the Upgrade Guide.