Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.6.3¶

CernVM-FS 2.6.3 is a patch release. It fixes parsing of the /etc/hosts file for several corner cases (CVM-1796, CVM-1797). Otherwise it is identical to version 2.6.2.

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.6.2¶

CernVM-FS 2.6.2 is a patch release. It fixes a rare block during hotpatch introduced with version 2.6.1 (CVM-1795). Otherwise it is identical to version 2.6.1.

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.6.1¶

CernVM-FS 2.6.1 is a patch release. It contains bugfixes and improvements for clients, stratum 0 and stratum 1 servers.

As with previous releases, upgrading clients should be seamless just by installing the new package from the repository. As usual, we recommend to update only a few worker nodes first and gradually ramp up once the new version proves to work correctly. Please take special care when upgrading a cvmfs client in NFS mode.

For Stratum 1 servers, there should be no running snapshots during the upgrade. For publisher and gateway nodes, all transactions must be closed and no active leases must be present before upgrading.

Together with CernVM-FS 2.6.1 we also release the CernVM-FS Gateway Services version 1.1.0. This version of the gateway services includes the notification service and therefore obsoletes the dedicated cvmfs-notify package.

Note for upgrades from versions prior to 2.6.0: please also see the specific instructions in the release notes for version 2.6.0 and earlier.

Bug Fixes and Improvements¶

Client: fix potential hang during reload if a config repository is used CVM-1466

Client: fix file descriptor exhaustion when browsing many small catalogs CVM-1742

Client: fix potential mix-up of chunked files in NFS mode CVM-1791

Client: disable active kernel cache eviction as workaround for stale negative file system entries CVM-1759

Client: fix placement of cvmfschecksum.* files for uncommon cache setups CVM-1728

Client: fix host file parsing in DNS resolver, triggered by gcc >= 9 CVM-1763

Client: check for missing autofs map directory include in cvmfs_config chksetup CVM-1686

Server: fix exhaustive memory consumption in file processing pipeline CVM-1687

Server: fix snapshot -a when no replicas are defined

Server: fix tarball ingestion at deeply nested catalog structures CVM-1721

Server: fix Geo-API’s Cloudflare support for known proxies CVM-1774

Server: fix locking logic in Geo-API web service CVM-1777

Server: periodically reload Geo-IP database CVM-1739

Server: add GC support for legacy catalogs before 1.0 schema stabilized CVM-1698

Server: fix master key card handling with openssl-pkcs11 >= 0.4.7 CVM-1788

Server: fix grafting of empty files CVM-1785

Server: add -g <snapshot group> option to replication commands CVM-1779

Server, S3: fix various issues in the HTTP 429 rate throttling behavior CVM-1755

Server, S3: Fix name resolution with DNS style buckets

Server, S3: fix small memory leak

Server, S3: fix AWSv4 authentication when using a non standard port

Server, S3: fix potential race condition in the stats collector for the S3 uploader

Server, gateway: fix repository checks from publisher nodes CVM-1732

Gateway: fix garbage collection on the repository gateway node CVM-1705

Gateway: relocation temporary files so that repository integrity checks pass CVM-1704

Gateway: fix file mode for gateway keys in cvmfs_server import_keychain CVM-1746

Gateway: fix key parser for keys containing repeated characters

Gateway: fix transaction lock name for tarball ingest

Gateway: more robust parsing of gateway API keys CVM-1693

Notification service: use server-sent events instead of WebSockets

DUCC: fix usage of singularity in container publishing service

Fix syntax errors in external libraries build system CVM-1781 CVM-1782

Release Notes for CernVM-FS 2.6.0¶

CernVM-FS 2.6 is a feature release that comes with performance improvements, new functionality, and bugfixes. We would like to thank Dave Dykstra (FNAL), Brian Bockelman and Derek Weitzel (U. Nebraska) and Nick Hazekamp (U. Notre Dame) for their contributions to this release!

This release comes with several new, experimental satellite serivces around the CernVM-FS core components:

DUCC (daemon that unpacks container images into CernVM-FS). This new component automates the publication of container images from a Docker registry into CernVM-FS.

Repository change notification system, which is complementary to the default, pull-based approach to propagate repository updates.

Repository shrinkwrap utility. This new utility allows for exporting large parts of a CernVM-FS repository to an external file system or a “fat image” as they are used in some HPC environments.

Together with CernVM-FS 2.6.0, we also release the CernVM-FS Repository Gateway version 1.0. The increased version number indicates that we are ready to assure backward compatibility for the component, in line with semantic versioning rules.

Other notable changes include

A new server command cvmfs_server ingest, that can be used to directly publish tarballs without extracting them first.

Publishing and garbage collection now maintain operational statistics, for instance about the number of files added and deleted.

Various improvements for the S3 backend.

A file system call tracer that can be enabled on the client in order to log the file system accesses to a repository.

Support for bearer token authentication in addition to X.509 authentication for protected repositories.

Various new routines in libcvmfs that provide access to cvmfs-specific meta-data, such as the nested catalog structure.

As with previous releases, upgrading should be seamless just by installing the new package from the repository. As usual, we recommend to update only a few worker nodes first and gradually ramp up once the new version proves to work correctly. Please take special care when upgrading a client in NFS mode.

For Stratum 0 servers, all transactions must be closed before upgrading. For Stratum 1 servers, there should be no running snapshots during the upgrade. After the software upgrade, publisher nodes (stratum 0) require doing cvmfs_server migrate for each repository.

Note: if the configuration of the repository publisher node is handled by a configuration management system (Puppet, Chef, …), please see Section Manual Migration from 2.5.2 Release Manager Machines.

Container Image Unpacker (DUCC)¶

The DUCC system manages the conversion of container images from a Docker registry into an unpacked form on a CernVM-FS repository. The converted images can be used with Docker and the CernVM-FS graph driver plugin for Docker. They can also be used with Singularity and other container engines that work with a flat root file system.

Starting containers from unpacked images in CernVM-FS often provides significant time and network traffic savings, as only a small fraction of the files in the container image is actually used at runtime.

Repository Change Notifications¶

The new repository change notification system provides a publish-subscribe service to instantaneously distribute repository updates. On publish, a change notification can be pushed, which is sent to via WebSockets to registered clients. The CernVM-FS client can be configured to show the new content within few seconds. This facilitates, for instance, CI pipelines where build artifacts from one build phase need to be available as an input to the next build phase.

Shrinkwrap¶

The shrinkwrap utility is a stand-alone tool that exports a part of a CernVM-FS repository directory hierarchy to another file system. This exported tree can then be re-packaged into a “fat image” for HPC systems, or it can be used for benchmarks that exclude possible performance effects caused by the CernVM-FS client, such as network accesses to populate the cache.

Bug Fixes¶

Client, macOS: fix hang during cvmfs_config reload

Client: fix credentials handling on HTTP retries for protected repositories (CVM-1660)

Server: prevent following dirtab entries that point outside the repository (CVM-1608)

Server, S3: fix rare crash during file upload

Server, S3: throttle upload frequency on HTTP 429 “too many requests” replies (CVM-1584)

Fix building on macOS Mojave

Fix warnings and errors in Debian packaging

Other Improvements¶

Client: log more details on HTTP host and proxy connection errors (CVM-1662)

Client: generally replace @fqrn@ and @org@ in configuration files (CVM-1526)

Client: add support for CVMFS_NFS_INTERLEAVED_INODES parameter (CVM-1561, Documentation)

Client: new parameter CVMFS_CATALOG_WATERMARK to unpin catalogs when their number surpasses the given watermark

Server: make publication process less likely to run out of file descriptors on the read-only union file system mount

Server, S3: retry upload requests on HTTP 502 errors in order to better handle high load on load-balancers

Server, S3: add support for CVMFS_S3_PEEK_BEFORE_PUT parameter, enabled by default (CVM-1584)

Server: reduce number of I/O operations to the local storage backend

Server: add support for CVMFS_NUM_UPLOAD_TASKS parameter for local storage backend

Manual Migration from 2.5.2 Release Manager Machines¶

If you do not want to use cvmfs_server migrate to automatically upgrade, publisher nodes that maintain Stratum 0 repositories can be migrated from version 2.5.2 with the following steps:

Ensure that there are no open transactions and garbage collection processes before updating the server software and during the repository layout migration.

Install the cvmfs-server 2.6.0 package.

For each repository: adjust /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/<REPOSITORY>/client.conf and add the CVMFS_NFILES=65536 parameter.

Update /etc/cvmfs/repositories.d/<REPOSITORY>/server.conf and set CVMFS_CREATOR_VERSION=141

In agreement with the repository owner it’s recommended to make a test publish

cvmfs_server transaction <REPOSITORY>
cvmfs_server publish <REPOSITORY>

before resuming normal operation.