[Ocfs2-announce] OCFS2 1.4 is released

[Sunil Mushran]

All,

We are pleased to announce the release of OCFS2 1.4. This release has
been available with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES10 SP2)
for some time now. Today we are announcing the release of the same for
Red Hat's and Oracle's Enterprise Linux (EL5 U2) distributions.

Before upgrading, users are encouraged to read the OCFS2 1.4 User's
Guide to learn about the new features, compatibility issues and also
about the new file system defaults.

Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network users looking to upgrade to this
release will need to subscribe to the "OCFS2 1.4 packages for Enterprise
Linux 5" channel. ULN users who do not wish to upgrade to this release
should not subscribe to this channel. They will keep getting the patch
upgrades for their OCFS2 1.2 install.

Red Hat's Enterprise Linux users will need to download and install the
relevant file system and tools packages from http://oss.oracle.com/.

Please note that this release only works on EL5 U2 or later. The
earliest supported kernel version is 2.6.18-92.el5. It will not work
with the older kernels. Needless to add, users looking to use OCFS2 1.4
will have to upgrade to EL5 U2. This goes for both Red Hat's and
Oracle's Enterprise Linux distributions.

NEW FEATURES

The list of new features added since the OCFS2 1.2 release is as follows:

 * Ordered Journaling Mode
 * File Attribute Support
 * Performance Enhancements
       - Directory Read-ahead
       - File Lookup
       - File Remove and Rename
 * Splice IO
 * Access Time Updates
 * Flexible Allocations
       - Sparse File Support
       - Unwritten Extents
       - Punching Holes
 * Shared Write-able mmap(2)
 * Inline Data ##
 * Online File System Resize
 * Clustered flock(2)

## The Inline Data support missed the cut-off. We will have it in the
next upgrade to ocfs2-tools.

For the full description of these features, please refer to the
OCFS2 1.4 User's Guide.

http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/dist/documentation/v1.4/ocfs2-1_4-usersguide.pdf

FILE SYSTEM COMPATIBILITY

OCFS2 1.4 can mount volumes created and used by OCFS2 1.2 release, as-is.

However, some new features will not be enabled by default. These include
sparse files, unwritten extents and inline data. These features will
need to be explicitly enabled using tunefs.ocfs2(8). Once enabled, the
same volume can still be mounted by the older file system but only after
the said feature is disabled using tunefs.ocfs2(8). Refer to the User's
Guide and the man pages for more.

TOOLS COMPATIBILITY

The latest release of the tools supports all existing versions of the
file system. This includes OCFS2 1.2, OCFS2 1.4 and the version of the
file system in the mainline Linux kernel.

Having said that, we are not recommending OCFS2 1.2 file system users
to upgrade to the 1.4 tools. This is because the defaults in the new
tools have been selected for the 1.4 file system release.

NEW FILE SYSTEM DEFAULTS

Sparse files and Unwritten extents are enabled by default by the new
mkfs.ocfs2(8). Users wishing to retain full compatibility with the older
file system release should specify "--fs-feature-level=max-compat"
during format.

The file system now defaults to the ordered data journaling mode. Users
wishing to use the writeback data journaling mode will need to mount
with the "data=writeback" mount option. Refer to the User's Guide to
learn about the differences between the two modes.

MISSING FEATURE

The OCFS2 1.4 BETA announcement mentioned the missing CDSL feature and
the reasons for the same. We are currently exploring a different
implementation that would allow us to provide a similar feature in a
future release.
http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/ocfs2-announce/2008-March/000023.html

SOFTWARE

Packages for Oracle's Enterprise Linux distribution are provided on ULN.
Users looking to upgrade must subscribe to the "OCFS2 1.4 packages for
Enterprise Linux 5" channel and install both the file system and the
corresponding tools.
http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/el-errata/2008-August/000711.html

Packages for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are provided by
Novell. Users looking to upgrade must install SLES10 SP2.
http://download.novell.com/

Packages for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux are provided on oss.oracle.com.
Users looking to upgrade must download and install the packages for
both the file system and the tools.
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/files/RedHat/RHEL5/
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/files/RedHat/RHEL5/

FEEDBACK

For any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to email us at
the ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com mailing list.

The OCFS2 Team

OCFS2: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2
TOOLS: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools
DOCS : http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/documentation/