Release Notes v7.2.5

The BeeGFS 7.2.5 release includes small bugfixes and QoL improvements.

General Changes/Improvements

  • The client can now cache ENOENT results from stat() for a configurable amount of time, which can significantly increase performance for certain workloads like compilers or python virtual environments that search BeeGFS for libraries. The new cache is disabled by default and can be enabled by setting the new configuration option tuneENOENTCacheValidityMS to a value greater than zero. Initial testing showed runtime reductions of over 75% for ENOENT-heavy workloads, even for cache times of only 1000ms.

  • The beegfs-ctl --getentryinfo command can now read lists of files that are separated bei null characters from stdin (--null flag). This enables batch processing of file lists on systems, where filenames contain newline characters.

Fixes

  • Fixed a bug, where the inode data cache time wasn’t updated correctly, which effectively disabled inode caching after the first time the confiured cache period (tuneFileSubentryCacheValidityMS) had elapsed. All subsequent stat() operations for that inode would then cause an RPC to the meta service.

  • The client configuration file now lists the correct default value (0) for tuneFileSubentryCacheValidityMS in the documentation section.

  • Fixed a bug, where beegfs-fsck would inadvertently set the link count to zero for files that were scheduled to have wrong attributes repaired.

  • Fixed a bug with secondary metadata servers forwarding truncate messages to the storage servers, which could cause metadata resyncs when storage servers were unreachable.

  • Three small packaging fixes:

    • The beeond package is now correctly categorized as noarch.

    • The file beegfs-client-build.mk has been moved from the beegfs-client package to the beegfs-client-dkms package, where it is actually used.

    • The script and the dashboard definitions contained in the beegfs-mon-grafana package for Debian based systems have been moved to the same path they are installed to on rpm based systems and that is mentioned in the documentation.

Known Issues and Limitations

  • The Metadata daemon does not work reliably on RHEL/CentOS 8 due to a problem in the libc version of RHEL/CentOS 8. The problem was fixed in RHEL/CentOS 8.1.

  • The client module might hang if the IBV device(s) used are taken offline during operation.

  • 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 8.4 (pre-release for testing in separate repositories, will likely be merged with RHEL 8 repositories at a later point in time)

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

The full integration test suite was run on CentOS 8.3, RHEL 7.9 and 8.3, SLES 15.1 and SLES 15.2 and Debian 9.11 and 10.7.

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

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

  • 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

  • Debian 9: no OFED, 5.4

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

  • Ubuntu 20: no OFED, 5.4

Version Interoperability

BeeGFS v7.2.5 is compatible with BeeGFS v7.2.x.

Upgrading from Older Versions

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