The 2.0.3 release of the kernel driver ports the process hang fix from the 1.0.5 driver. This hang occurred due to a tight race when live disks were disconnected under I/O. It is now fixed.

The 1.0.5 release of the kernel driver has the following changes:

• 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 1.0.5 release is for Linux 2.4-based kernels. 2.6-based kernels continue to use the 2.0 driver series.

The 2.0.3 release of oracleasm-support fixes a bug where a disk scan wasn't seeing changes made to a disk on another node.

The 2.0.2 release of the oracleasm-support package extends the hotplug changes from the 2.0.1 release. The cciss driver requires a longer wait time, so the 2.0.2 release extends the time a disk scan will wait for hotplug to complete.

The 2.0.2 release of the Oracle ASM library fixes two problems:

• 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.

The 2.0.2 release of the kernel driver has the following changes:

• 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.

The 2.0.1 release of the oracleasm-support package provides the following fixes:

• 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.

It is strongly recommended that customers upgrade the oracleasm-support package to 2.0.1. This version works with all driver versions 1.0.4 and later.

The 2.0.1 release of the Oracle ASM library has only one change. It supports the slight interface change of the 2.0.1 driver. The 2.0.1 library is required only for systems running the 2.0.1 driver. Systems using the 2.0.0 or 1.0.4 driver can use the 2.0.0 library or the 2.0.1 library.

The 2.0.1 release of the kernel driver now reports certain errors as non-fatal or local. This is a minor change that should not affect most installations. Systems running older kernels do not need to upgrade this package. The 2.0.0 driver will do just fine.

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

The 2.0 kernel driver adds support for distributions based on the Linux 2.6 kernel.

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.

The 2.0 release of the Oracle ASM library supports both the 2.0 driver for Linux 2.6 kernels and the 1.0.4+ driver for Linux 2.4 kernels. This enables one library to support both kernels at the same time.

The 2.0 version of the Oracle ASM support tools supports both the 2.0 driver and later for Linux 2.6 kernels and the 1.0.4 driver and later for Linux 2.4 kernels. It also adds some enhancements, such as the ability to query multiple disks at the same time.