Release Notes v7.2.6

The BeeGFS 7.2.6 release includes small bugfixes and QoL improvements.

General Changes/Improvements

  • Added CMake configuration files to enable builds with CMake.

  • Updated client module code to work with RHEL 8.5 and OFED 5.5.

  • Introduced an experimental client side option to disable session checks for read, write and fsync operations on files that were changed in that session. This can be useful to continue reading or writing after server crashes, at the expense of not being able to detect crashes and therefore potential loss of caches on the servers any more. This option should only be used after careful consideration and must not be used unless measures have been taken to prevent cache loss on the servers. Please see the documentation in the client configuration file for more information.

  • Some smaller changes to the documentation (quota, fsck).

Fixes

  • Fixed an integer overflow in the inode parsing code that could lead to miscalculations of stripe set sizes for very large chunksizes and numbers of targets.

  • Fixed a compile time issue with newer versions of GCC. The code will now build with GCC versions > 9.

  • Removed informational messages about RDMA connection initiation and teardown from the client log in standard log levels.

  • The fsck will now properly ignore the tuneENOENTCacheValidityMS introduced in 7.2.5.

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

  • Attempting to mount the filesystem with RDMA over RoCE will crash the kernel on RHEL 8.5 (and Rocky, Alma 8.5). RDMA over IB with and without Mellanox OFED works fine.

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: 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, 4.9

The full integration test suite was run on Rocky 8.5, RHEL 8.4, Rocky 8.4, Alma 8.4, CentOS 8.3, CentOS 7.9, OpenSUSE 15 SP3 and Debian 9 and 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

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

  • Rocky Linux 8.5: no OFED, OFED 5.5

  • 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

  • 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 v7.2.6 is compatible with BeeGFS v7.2.x.

Upgrading from Older Versions

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