Summary of changes

• Introduced support to improve AFM recovery performance by using the afmRecoveryVer2 parameter with the mmchfileset and mmcrfileset command. For more information, see mmchfileset and mmcrfileset command, AFM optimized recovery version v2 and AFM recovery improvements for remove and rename operations.
• Introduced support to set afmHashVersion to 5 as default version while setting new clusters. For more information, see Primary gateway and afmHashVersion.
• Introduced the -Y parameter in the mmafmcosctl command to display the command output in a parseable format. For more information, see mmafmcosctl command.
• AFM is not supported with RHEL 9.1 on ppc64le hardware that uses GPFS backend (NSD protocol).
• Introduced recommendations for AFM SW and IW mode fileset. For more information, see General guidelines and recommendations for AFM SW and IW mode fileset.

• Introduced support for downloading objects by using outband method. For more information, see Downloading objects by using outband method .
• Introduced support to add callbacks to track manual upload of files to COS. For more information, see mmaddcallback command.

Performance enhancement for repairing inode blocks

Performance enhancement for repairing inode blocks, especially for a file system with many snapshots created. This enhancement improves the performance of repairing the file system for the mmrestripefs, mmchdisk, mmdeldisk, and mmrpldisk commands.

The new sync option is added to the mmxcp command

The mmxcp sync command performs a single process sync operation between a source/snapshot and a target directory from a previously executed mmxcp copy. Files that appear different or are missing will be copied to the target directory. For more information, see the mmxcp command.

The -e parameter of the mmrepquota command is improved

The -e parameter of the mmrepquota command is improved to allow faster collection of updated quota usage data from all nodes before displaying results. For more information, see the mmrepquota command.

The new --threads Num option is added to the mmcheckquota command

The parameter --threads Num is added to the mmcheckquota command, which allows users to specify the number of threads that are created while running the mmcheckquota command. For more information, see the mmcheckquota command.

New options added to the gpfs.snap command

New options are added to the gpfs.snap command for collecting vmcore and sosreport information. For more information, see the gpfs.snap command.

New hint added to the gpfs_fcntl subroutine for performance improvement

The new Create Sharing hint is added to the gpfs_fcntl subroutine to improve the performance of a parallel application that creates multiple files in a shared directory. For more information, see the gpfs_fcntl() subroutine.

New option added to the mmlsfs command

The --uid option has been added to the mmlsfs command to display the file system unique identifier. For more information, see the mmlsfs command.

Increased CCR quorum node limit

Clusters with no tiebreaker disks can be configured with up to nine quorum nodes. Clusters with tiebreaker disks are still limited to a maximum of eight quorum nodes.

Support for HashiCorp Vault KMIP Secrets Engine

HashiCorp Vault KMIP Secrets Engine can be used as a remote key management (RKM) server for setting up encryption. For more information, see the Setup using HashiCorp Vault KMIP Secrets Engine.

IBM Spectrum Scale supports accelerated writes with GPUDirect Storage

IBM Spectrum Scale now supports the use of accelerated writes with GPUDirect Storage (GDS) in addition to the existing support of accelerated GDS reads and "writes in compatibility mode". For more information, see GPUDirect Storage support for IBM Spectrum Scale.

GPUDirect Storage employs an address handle cache

GPUDirect Storage (GDS) with IBM Spectrum Scale now employs an address handle cache to improve the performance especially of workloads with small block sizes via RoCE.

Comprehensive online file system repair for inode and block allocation map corruptions (Tech Preview)

The new option --repair-do-not-fix-lostblks is added to the mmfsckx command as a Technical Preview feature. This option can be used to repair file system corruption such as user file corruption and block/inode allocation map inconsistencies. This option does not repair lost blocks, reserved inodes, or directory inconsistencies. The support of --repair-do-not-fix-lostblks option can be tested on non-production systems only due to the tech preview license.

For more information, contact IBM on scale@us.ibm.com.

• POST filesystems/{filesystemName}/filesets/{filesetName}/cos/policy
• PUT filesystems/{filesystemName}/filesets/{filesetName}/cos/policy
• GET filesystems/{filesystemName}/filesets/{filesetsName}/cos/policy
• DELETE filesystems/{filesystemName}/filesets/{filesetName}/cos/policy

• The Hardware page includes the status of non-stretch clusters.
• GUI installations on RHEL9 requires nftables to be installed.
• The CES networking page includes the CIDR format for CES IP addresses.
• Under the Protocols menu, you can access the DAS S3 Accounts and DAS S3 Exports options. The DAS S3 option is accessible under the Services menu.

• Introduced support of min domain uid (G) as a new option to mmsmb export. For more information, see mmsmb command.
• Updated the IBM Spectrum Scale SMB to upstream SMB 4.16 version. The SMB 4.16 comes with some performance improvement as compared to the SMB 4.15 (though the performance is not on a par with the SMB 4.12 version).
• The Network Information Service (NIS) authentication is not supported for RHEL 9. For more information, see mmuserauth command.

For compatibility reasons on IBM Spectrum Scale 5.1.0.x and later on Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 7.x (7.7 and later), a few Python 2 files are packaged and they might trigger dependency-related messages. In certain scenarios, Python 2.7 might also be required to be installed. Multiple versions of Python can co-exist on the same system. For more information, see the entry about mmadquery in Guidance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.x on IBM Spectrum Scale nodes.

The Python code in IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0.y or earlier continues to be in Python 2.

IBM Spectrum Scale 5.1.x supports Python 3.6 or later. It is recommended that Python 3.6 is installed through the OS package manager (For example, yum install python3). If you install Python 3.6 by other means, then unexpected results might occur, such as failure to install gpfs.base for prerequisite checks, and workarounds might be required.

• Added a new component NVMeoF in the parameter list of the mmhealth node show and mmhealth cluster show commands. For more information, see the mmhealth command.

• Added performance monitoring tool planning details for the memory and filesystem provisioning on the nodes that are running the pmcollector service. For more information, see Planning for performance monitoring tool.

• New events added for the following:

  • NVMeoF events
  • Stretch cluster events
  • RPC waiters events
• Introduced information related to impact of sensor configuration. For more information, see Impact of sensor configuration.
• Introduced GPFSFCM metrics for IBM Spectrum Scale. For more information, see ESS metrics.
• Introduced use case to observe the filesystem capacity usage by using default threshold rules. For more information, see Use case 2: Observe the filesystem capacity usage by using default threshold rules.

New commands

There are no new commands.

New structures

There are no new structures.

New subroutines

There are no new subroutines.

New user exits

There are no new user exits.

Changed commands

• mmaddcallback
• mmafmcosaccess
• mmafmcosconfig
• mmafmcosctl
• mmafmctl
• mmauth
• mmcheckquota
• mmchconfig
• mmchfileset
• mmchpolicy
• mmcrfileset
• mmexpelnode
• mmfsckx
• mmkeyserv
• mmnsddiscover
• mmperfmon
• mmrepquota
• mmsetquota
• mmsmb
• mmxcp

Changed structures

There are no changed structures.

Changed subroutines

gpfs_fcntl()

Deleted commands

There are no deleted commands.

Deleted structures

There are no deleted structures.

Deleted subroutines

There are no deleted subroutines.

New messages

6027-2420, 6027-3115, 6027-3266, 6027-3267, 6027-3336, 6027-3337, and 6027-4025, and 6027-4212

Changed messages

There are no changed messages.

Deleted messages

There are no deleted messages.

List of documentation changes in product guides and respective IBM Documentation sections

The following is a list of documentation changes including changes in topic titles, changes in placement of topics, and deleted topics:

Table 1. List of changes in documentation

Guide	IBM Documentation section	List of changes
IBM Spectrum Scale: Problem Determination Guide	Troubleshooting	Changed topic title GPUDirect Storage issues to GPUDirect Storage troubleshooting