Release Notes v7.2.8

The BeeGFS 7.2.8 release includes some improvements to quota handling and the native cache mode as well as multiple other fixes and QoL improvements.

Warning

Before upgrading to this version from any version <7.2.7, please read the section about mandatory Authentication carefully. If you have not configured a connAuthFile, services will no longer start without configuration changes. For more background on why we make this change, please refer to our blog post on the topic.

General Changes/Improvements

  • The meta service can now enforce quota for file creations.

  • Changed EntryID locking in the metadata lock store to resolve an issue with rmdir. This change also leads to significantly improved stat and read performance in our testing.

  • Changed the behavior of beegfs-ctl --getquota --list to only list users or groups that have nonzero quota unless the --withzero option is supplied. This makes the behavior consistent with beegfs-ctl --getquota --all.

  • Added options to make connection timeouts for TCP and RDMA connections configurable. Note that this is an experimental feature and should only be used for testing. Do not change the timeouts in production environments unless rigorous testing has been done.

  • The parser for beegfs-mounts.conf can now recognize and ignore full line comments (lines starting with a #).

  • Lots of smaller improvements for our testing pipelines.

Fixes

  • Fixed an issue with quota enforcement on the meta servers (for chown/chgrp), where lists for users and groups that are over quota were not correctly updated.

  • Fixed a deadlock between mmap and read when both were operating on the same memory area. This should fix issues with multithreaded runs of fasterq-dump that have been reported by some users.

  • Added connDisableAuthentication configuration to client runtime config in procfs to fix an issue where beegfs-ctl with the --mount flag was not able to connect to other servers when connection authentication was disabled.

  • The client will no longer attempt to drop the link count on an inode if it is already 0.

  • Fixed an issue where the OFED_INCLUDE_PATH was not assigned early enough during DKMS client build, causing the feature detection to fail in some situations.

  • Some other smaller fixes to avoid warnings during compilation.

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 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 RHEL 8.5, Rocky 8.6, Alma 8.5, CentOS 8.3, 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

  • 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

  • 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 v7.2.8 is compatible with BeeGFS v7.2.x.

Upgrading from Older Versions

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