BeeGFS Changelog (v7.x Release Series)
======================================

== Changes in 7.1 (release date: 2018-09-24) ==

Version 7.1 marks a significant change in BeeGFS's deployment process.
If you want to upgrade an installation of BeeGFS to a newer minor
version (e.g. from 7.0 to 7.1), then it is required to upgrade all servers
and clients to the new version accordingly. This approach ensures, that
functionality and API can be delivered in a more consistent way and eases
support and introduction of new features. For more details about updating
from a previous version to BeeGFS 7.1, please check UpgradeNotes.txt.

General Changes
* Removed support of Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) in favor of RDMA.
  SDP has been deprecated for a while by OFED (OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution)

Enhancements
* Implemented Cassandra support for beegfs-mon
* Implemented Storage Pool support for BeeOND
* general: Simplified RDMA configuration steps
* client: Added compatibility with OFED4.3
* general: Added documentation for some previously undocumented "expert options"
* ctl: Added confirmation prompt to mirrormd option

Fixes and improvements
* common/ctl: Fixed possible overflow of clientstats opCounters
* admon: Fixed daemon startup using systemd
* common:Fixed overflow in stripe target index computation (issue with extremely large chunk sizes)
* meta: Fixed Remote IO error when creating the same file from two different mount points
  simultaneously, with metadata mirroring on
* all daemons: Fixed error condition which could cause a daemon to shut down on receiving an invalid datagram
* all daemons: Improve stability when disk is completely full
* ctl: Add check for active clients when enabling metadata mirroring
* client: Fixed handling of ACLs, which were not always immediately applied after setting
* all daemons: Added name resolution error reporting

== Changes in 7.0 ==

The development of BeeGFS v7 was focused on three major new features:
* Storage Pools
* Modification Event Logging
* Performance and load monitoring service

Storage pools are an innovative new concept to take advantage of SSDs, designed
in response to the limited effectiveness of transparent SSD caching mechanisms
for HDDs. With storage pools, system administrators can create pools of
different types of storage devices and users can select to assign certain data
(e.g. the active project directory) to the flash pool and move it to a different
pool later when they are done, or certain data can be kept on the flash pool
forever - all in the same namespace. For data living on the flash pool, users
have the full performance advantage of an all-flash storage system.
The beegfs-ctl tool has been extended to allow creation of pools
(--addstoragepool), data assignment to pools (--setpattern) and data migration
between pools (--migrate), and per-pool quota ensure that users have a
motivation to not keep their data on the flash pool for too long.

The new modification event logging enables capturing of creation, removal and
modification of files to avoid the need to run full file system scans in
various cases, especially for backups.
For details see https://www.beegfs.io/wiki/FilesystemModificationEvents

Information about current performance and system load information was previously
available as live statistics through the beegfs-ctl tool. The new beegfs-mon
service collects this data in a time series database (InfluxDB), which makes it easier to
see how the system or an I/O-intensive job performed. From the time series
database, the collected data can easily be accessed and visualized by a monitoring 
solution of users choice, such as Grafana. For a fast and easy setup, beegfs-mon comes
with some predefined Grafana panels.

General Changes:

* Added storage pool functionality
* Added file event logging functionality to meta data server
* Added beegfs-mon monitoring tool
* beeond: Added function to unload the beegfs client module when beeond stops.

Enhancements:

* beegfs-ctl: Improved some help and error messages
* client: Add possibility to specify a "hook script" to run after mounting and
  before unmounting of BeeGFS.
* Switch to native systemd service startup for all daemons on systemd platforms.
  (See UpgradeNotes)
* "beegfs-ctl --find" gained new filter options (see command help)

Fixes:

* client: Fixed compatibility issue with kernel 4.14
* client: Fixed issue that allowed only one client to be started on Linux 4.14
* meta: Fixed compatibility issue when upgrading from very old releases
* client: Fix cases in which faulty data could be read from NFS.


Compatibility Notes
===================
* Drop support of 32bit packages (except on Debian)

* Package downloads available for:
    * RHEL 6/7 (and Fedora), x86_64
    * SLES 12 (and OpenSuse), x86_64
    * Debian 8/9 (and Ubuntu), x86_64, i386
* Supported Linux kernel versions (client): ranging from 2.6.32 to 4.14.13,
  see list of supported kernels: http://www.beegfs.io/release/beegfs_7_1/SupportedKernelVersions.txt
* Servers and clients from different major release series are not compatible
  and cannot be used together in the same file system instance.
* If you want to upgrade from a previous release, see here for upgrade notes:
  http://www.beegfs.io/release/beegfs_7_1/UpgradeNotes.txt