[Ocfs2-announce] OCFS2 1.4.4-1 and OCFS2 Tools 1.4.3-1 released

[Sunil Mushran]

All,

We are pleased to announce the release of OCFS2 1.4.4-1 and OCFS2 Tools
1.4.3-1 for Oracle's and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5 Update 2 and higher.

Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network users who are subscribing to the "OCFS2
1.4 packages for Enterprise Linux 5" channel can upgrade to this release
by running up2date.
http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/el-errata/2009-September/001170.html
http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/el-errata/2009-September/001169.html

Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5 users can download and install the relevant
file system and tools packages from oss.oracle.com.
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/files/RedHat/RHEL5/
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/files/RedHat/RHEL5/

Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server's (SLES10 SP2) latest kernel already
includes elements of this release. Users should contact Novell for more
information about OCFS2 on SLES10.

COMPATIBILITY

This release is fully compatible with OCFS2 1.4.1 and 1.4.2. Users can
upgrade their nodes to the new version in a rolling manner if they so
choose.

This release is on-disk compatible with OCFS2 1.2.x. Users can install
the software and mount the older volumes as-is. However, as the two
releases are not network compatible, a rolling upgrade from 1.2 to 1.4
is not allowed.

NEW RECOMMENDATION

Users should add the "noatime" mount option to the mounts that hold the
Oracle datafiles, redologs, archivelogs, voting file, etc. This is because
OCFS2 1.4 supports atime (access time) which makes it update inodes even
on a read.  Like ls -l. As tracking access time is not useful for the
database, users are advised to disable it for such mounts.

WHAT'S CHANGED

This release includes few bug fixes and a performance improvement.

The main bug fixed concerns unlinked file not releasing space. The file
system now scans the orphan directory at a regular interval to delete
orphaned files that are no longer in use. This workload is spread evenly
across all nodes in the cluster.

The fsck performance has been significantly improved. fsck.ocfs2 now
aggressively caches the metadata blocks inorder to reduce the time it
takes to check a volume. Users can take advantage of this by running
fsck.ocfs2 on a node with lots of free memory.

Please refer to the news sections for the full change log.
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/news/article_21.html
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/news/article_8.html

BUGS FIXED

Oracle# 7643059 Some orphaned files are not getting deleted
Oracle# 8726865 Init the cluster we're writing to in a non-sparse extend
OSS#    1127    tunefs error: Invalid block number while closing device
OSS#    1162    Kernel BUG at fs/ocfs2/dlmglue.c:2603
Novell# 524683  kernel BUG at fs/ocfs2/dlmglue.c:796

FEEDBACK

Please do not hesitate to email us at the ocfs2-users at oss.oracle.com
with any questions and comments.

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/