Release Notes v7.2.15

The BeeGFS 7.2.15 comes with fixes for a number of bugs for metadata Buddy Mirroring and RDMA connections.

General Changes/Improvements

  • Added support for lseek() with SEEK_CUR and offset=0 on directories. This improves compatibility with NFS and applications that use this method to determine the current offset in a directory, addressing an issue reported with ‘ls’ over NFS.

Fixes

  • Resolved a SIGBUS error in BeeGFS client caused by receiving stale file size information from the metadata server. This issue was particularly evident when files were accessed simultaneously by multiple applications, leading to incorrect file size updates and SIGBUS errors during memory-mapped operations.

  • Resolved an issue in the hardlink code path where link count updates were not being performed correctly in specific racy workloads, potentially leading to dangling dentries, orphaned #fSiDs#, and buddy resync failures.

  • Fixed a compilation error when building beegfs-client with RDMA support disabled (BEEGFS_NO_RDMA=1 build option) in older 7.2.x versions.

  • Addressed a potential NULL pointer dereference in IBVSocket.c when protection domain (pd) allocation fails.

  • Fixed multiple smaller issues with the CMake build

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

Supported distributions

Packages are provided for the x86_64 and aarch64 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 distributions we provide packages for are fully supported by the BeeGFS server services (mgmtd, meta, storage, mon). To keep the test matrix manageable and because kernel APIs tend to change frequently, even in distribution minor releases, the BeeGFS client generally only supports the default slow moving distribution kernels (not hwe, backports and similar). Custom kernel builds might or might not work and are generally not supported. There can also be incompatibilities between the client and very recent distribution kernel relases. We advise to have a look at the Client Build Testing section below for more information on what has been tested.

The same is true for RDMA driver versions that are generally not problematic on the servers, but can cause issues on the client. The following Mellanox OFED driver versions are supported: 5.8, 5.7, 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

Client build testing was done on the following OS and RDMA driver combinations (click to expand). Other kernel versions might or might not work. If a version of MOFED was successfully tested on one OS, it is very likely that it will also work in combination with other kernels.

Tested distribution and driver version combinations

  • RHEL 7.9: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 4.9, 5.0, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4

  • RHEL 8.3: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 4.9, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4

  • AlmaLinux 8.4: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.3, 5.4

  • AlmaLinux 8.5: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.3, 5.4, 5.5

  • AlmaLinux 8.7: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.8

  • Rocky Linux 8.4: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.3, 5.4

  • Rocky Linux 8.5: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.5

  • Rocky Linux 8.6: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.6

  • Rocky Linux 8.7: MOFED 5.8

  • Rocky Linux 8.8: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.8

  • SLES 15.1: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.0

  • SLES 15.2: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.1, 5.4

  • SLES 15.3: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.4, 5,5, 5.6

  • Debian 9: Kernel RDMA drivers, 5.4

  • Debian 10: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.2, 5.3, 5.4

  • Ubuntu 18: Kernel RDMA drivers

  • Ubuntu 20: Kernel RDMA drivers, MOFED 5.4

Version Interoperability

BeeGFS v7.2.15 is compatible with BeeGFS 7.2.x.

Upgrading from Older Versions

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