oracleasm-support 2.1.7

oracleasm driver for SLES 11

oracleasm driver for RHEL 6

Unchanged in 2.1.0

• The 2.1.0 release of oracleasm support is still compatible with the same drivers as the 2.0 version.
• The /etc/init.d/oracleasm script behaves exactly as before. This should be a drop-in upgrade.

New in 2.1.0

• There is a new /usr/sbin/oracleasm command that provides a much more flexible interface to the oracleasm support software. oracleasm operations are subcommands for the oracleasm program. The /etc/init.d/oracleasm script now uses the oracleasm program as well. All new features are accessed by using the new oracleasm command.
• There is a new oracleasm update-driver command that will try to download the latest Oracle ASMLib driver for a given kernel. It can update multiple kernel versions at once. If no version is specified, it will update the currently running kernel. This supports drivers available via the Unbreakable Linux Network and on the Oracle Technology Network.
• The oracleasm querydisk command adds the -d and -p options. The -d option will display the device number of the queried disk. The -p option will attempt to locate matching device paths if the blkid(8) tool is installed.
• The oracleasm deletedisk command can delete a disk by device as well as by name.
• The oracleasm scandisks command adds the -s option. This option prevents a scan from re-reading the partition table of a device. It is safer when scanning running disks, though it will not pick up partitioning changes.
• The oracleasm scandisks command can now be given a list of disks to scan. The administrator can use this to only scan specific disks, such as newly added ones.

• Testing uncovered a tight race when disks are disconnected from the system. This race could result in a process hanging. This is now fixed.

   

• The logging infrastructure introduced to the 2.0.2 driver has been backported to the 1.0 driver series. This allows better debugging at the customer site. The logging will only be enabled when requested by Oracle support.

   

• The library reported incorrect sector sizes on s390x (zSeries).

   

• The library had a problem with large disks when running a 32-bit library on a 64-bit platform.

   

• It was possible for a disk error to crash the operating system. The driver now merely reports an error.

   

• The driver would report the wrong sector size on s390x (zSeries). This is now fixed.

   

• Drivers are now available for the "largesmp" kernel of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS.

   

• Additional debug information can be obtained via new logging infrastructure. This allows better debugging at the customer site. The logging will only be enabled when requested by Oracle support.

   

• It adds the ability to determine loopback, MD, LVM, and device-mapper devices. The /etc/init.d/oracleasm createdisk command will succeed even though these devices do not support partitions. This change is part of the updated oracleasm-support package.

   

• It fixes a bug where disk scanning entered into a race condition with the hotplug subsystem. Disk scanning requests the operating system reload the disk partition tables. This causes hotplug events, which raced with the scan. The 2.0.1 support tools handle this and wait for the hotplug events to complete. This fix is part of the updated oracleasm-support package.

   

Also new in this release is support for IBM Power machines.

Starting with Oracle ASMLib release 2.0.0, all ASMLib installations require that the driver packages be named after the kernel that they support. Run the " uname -r" command on your computer to determine your kernel version. The corresponding package has the name oracleasm-<kernel_version>.

Distributions based on Linux 2.4 kernels still use the 1.0.X driver software, release 1.0.4 or better. Distributions based on Linux 2.6 kernels use 2.0.x drivers. See the driver matrix for more information.