Release Notes v7.4.1

The BeeGFS 7.4.1 release adds support for restricting outgoing network traffic on the servers and fixes some bugs that were introduced with 7.4.0 and other minor issues.

General Changes/Improvements

  • The user space services (mgmtd, meta, storage and mon) can now be configured to only use interfces listed in connInterfacesFile for outgoing communications. This can be activated by setting the new configuration option connRestrictOutboundInterfaces to true. The mechanism consults the operating system’s routing tables via libnl3 to figure out the appropriate interface for a given destination. Because the default route rarely is a good candidate for reaching other BeeGFS nodes, it has the lowest priority during interface selection and can be removed from consideration with the second new configuration option connNoDefaultRoute. Please see the configuration documentation for more information.

  • Export file handles obtained via name_to_handle_at(2) will now be padded with zeroes up to their 4 byte aligned length. In earlier versions the last two bytes of such handles would be random on some systems, which made handles for the same file look different.

Fixes

  • Fixed various issues with the new hard link code that were introduced in 7.4.0. Issues include a lock up with metadata buddy mirroring, EBUSY messages with beegfs-ctl --migrate and a rare meta crash that wasn’t fixed in 7.4.0p1. We recommend to upgrade 7.4.0(p1) systems to 7.4.1 for increased stability.

  • Fixed an issue where the ENOENT cache on the client wouldn’t be invalidated correctly under certain circumstances, even if tuneENOENTCacheValidityMS was set to 0.

  • Fixed a warning about a redundant move on gcc 11 and newer.

  • Minor fixes to string comparisons in the client configuration parser.

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 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 and aarch64 architecture and the following distributions:

  • RHEL 8 and 9 (packages can also be used on RockyLinux and Alma Linux)

  • SLES 15

  • Debian 10, 11 and 12

  • Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 and 22.04

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 Alma 8.5, Alma 9.0, Debian 10, Debian 11, Debian 12, OpenSUSE 15.4, Rocky 8.5, Rocky 8.6, Rocky 8.7, Rocky 9.1, Rocky 9.2, Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04.

Client build testing:

  • 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

  • AlmaLinux 9.0: no OFED, OFED 5.6, 5.7

  • 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 8.8: no OFED, OFED 5.8

  • Rocky Linux 9.1: no OFED, OFED 5.8

  • Rocky Linux 9.2: no OFED

  • 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, 5.8

  • SLES 15.4: OFED 5.5

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

  • Debian 11: no OFED, OFED 5.6

  • Debian 12: no OFED

  • Ubuntu 18.04: no OFED

  • Ubuntu 20.04: no OFED, OFED 5.4

  • Ubuntu 22.04: no OFED, OFED 5.6, 5.7, 5.8

Version Interoperability

BeeGFS 7.4.1 is fully compatible with 7.4.0 but not fully compatible with older versions of BeeGFS.

The incompatibilities between 7.4.1 and 7.3.x are limited to hard link functionality and a change in the monitoring message format. Please refer to the Upgrade Guide for more information.

Upgrading from Older Versions

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