oracleasm driver for SLES 11 is built and distributed by Novell. Please contact Novell for the driver.

The 2.1.3 release of oracleasm-support fixes a bug in the update-driver-otn command. It would sometimes match drivers incorrectly. It also adds RAM disks to the whitelist of devices that do not need to be partitioned. Finally, it adds support for SLES11.

The 2.0.4 release of oracleasmlib fixes a rare memory leak. Most processes only perform secondary initialization, relying on an initial process in the instance to do the initial work. If that initial work never got done, the other processes should receive an error. However, oracleasmlib was erroneously returning success.

The 2.1.2 release of oracleasm-support fixes a bug in the init scripts where the hwscan service was required even on systems where it does not exist. It is now correctly listed as "Should-Start". This is Oracle bug #7590656. In addition, the init script headers were updated to satisfy all LSB-compliant systems.

The 2.1.1 release of oracleasm-support fixes a bug where scandisks was not waiting properly for udev after triggering a re-read of disk partitions. This is Oracle bug #7578508.

The 2.1.0 release of oracleasm-support is a major rework that brings new functionality to the Oracle ASMLib support tools.

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.

The 2.0.5 release of the kernel driver fixes a bug in the lookup of disk objects. If disks are opened and closed rapidly and repeatedly, the lookup code could mistake one disk object for another. This is Oracle bug #6135457. This sort of repeated open and close is not a part of normal operation, and this bug is very unlikely to be hit by ASM's normal behavior. Users of the 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 drivers do not need to upgrade unless they are hitting this issue.

The 2.0.4 release of the kernel driver provides build compatiblity for some newer distributions. Users of the 2.0.3 driver do not need to upgrade.

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.