This document covers the following topics regarding Oracle Linux 5.7.
For the latest updates please refer to the online version of release notes available
at:
http://oss.oracle.com/el5/docs/
NOTE: An upgrade of Oracle Linux from a beta release is not supported. Further, an in-place upgrade between major versions of Oracle Linux is not supported. Oracle does not recommend an upgrade from earlier major versions of Oracle Linux even though anaconda provides an option to do this upgrade. A fresh installation is strongly recommended rather than a system upgrade between major versions.
The following RPMs are modified from the upstream release. All changes are trademark and look/feel related unless otherwise noted below under the specific RPM.
The following packages have been removed
The following documentation packages have been removed
The following packages were added upstream for this release (5.7) which were not in the previous update release (5.6)
The following packages have been added to the release
Oracle Linux 5.7 ships with the following kernel packages
Note:Oracle Linux 5.7 includes both a 32 bit and a 64 bit Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Both Unbreakable Enterprise kernel and Red Hat compatible kernel are installed and the system boots with Unbreakable Enterprise kernel by default. If needed /etc/grub.conf can be modifed to make the system boot with Red Hat compatible kernel by default.
This section covers significant changes in the Red Hat compatible kernel in this release.
This is the Red Hat compatible kernel with critical bug fixes produced by Oracle.
The Red Hat Compatible Kernel with Bug Fixes by Oracle must be manually installed. To install this kernel, follow these steps:
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is based on the upstream kernel 2.6.32-41 stable source tree with additional performance improvements, including:
Oracle Linux 5.7 includes both a 32 bit and a 64 bit Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is the default kernel after installation.
OFED implements Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and kernel bypass mechanisms to deliver high-efficiency computing, wire-speed messaging, ultra-low microsecond latencies and fast I/O for servers, block storage and file systems.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel includes the OCFS2 1.6 kernel module. New features include:For more details, see the OCFS2 1.6 User's Guide
- JBD2 support
- Extended attributes
- POSIX ACLs
- Security attributes
- Metadata checksums
- Indexed directories
- REFLINKs
The Linux data integrity framework (DIF) enables applications or kernel subsystems to attach metadata to I/O operations, allowing devices that support DIF to verify the integrity before passing them further down the stack and physically committing them to disk. Data Integrity Extensions or DIX is a hardware feature that enables exchange of protection metadata between host operating system and HBA.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is tickless. In the tickless kernel, timer interrupts are performed on demand rather than at a predetermined frequency. This allows CPUs to stay in a low power state when the system is idle, reducing overall power consumption
TCG can track and group processes into user-defined cgroups so that the operating system can treat them as whole and perform scheduling, accounting, and resourceallocation accordingly. For example, using TCG, you can associate a set of CPU cores and memory nodes to a group of processes that makeup an application or a group of applications. This enables subsetting larger systems, more fine grained control over CPU and memory, and isolation of applications.
The performance counter subsystem keeps track of hardware and software events without affecting performance and enables you to do tracing and performance analysis. Included is a tool called perf for analysis.
The kernel block layer will detect devices that claim to be fast,solid state storage and tune itself accordingly. The result of this detection can be found in:/sys/block/xxx/queue/rotationalWhere xxx is the block device. Echoing a 0 or a 1 into this file will force the value to off or on. When assuming a device is an SSD, the block layer will try harder to immediately dispatch the IO to the device.
IO affinity ensures processing of a completed IO is handled by the same CPU that initiated the IO. It can have a fairly large impact on performance, especially on large NUMA machines. IO affinity is turned on by default, but it can be controlled via the tunable in /sys/block/xxx/queue/rq_affinity. For example, the following will turn IO affinity on:echo 1> /sys/block/sda/queue/rq_affinity
RPS distributes the load of received packet processing across multiple CPUs. This solution allows protocol processing (e.g. IP and TCP) to be performed on packets in parallel. This removes a bottleneck when a single core is saturated processing network interrupts. To enable receive packet steering for the interface xxx, place a CPU mask into/sys/class/net/xxx/queues/rx-0/rps_cpusThe cpu mask takes the same form as the masks for the taskset command. For example:echo 0x55> /sys/class/net/eth0/queues/rx-0/rps_cpus
fallocate() is a new system call which will allow applications to preallocate space to any file(s) in a file system. Applications can get a guarantee of space for particular file(s) - even if later the system becomes full. Using this method of allocation can dramatically speed up the creation of large files such as those used for virtual machine images.
The following Technology Preview features are currently not supported under Oracle Linux 5 and may not be functionally complete.
These features are not suitable for production use. However, these features are included to provide the feature with wider exposure.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel version kernel-uek-2.6.32-100.34.1 adds support for paravirtualized drivers in a HVM guest on Oracle VM. Starting with this kernel version, the default is to present only paravirtualized drivers when running in a hardware virtualized guest. To run kernel-uek --including the drivers-- fully hardware virtualized, an additional kernel boot parameter "xen_emul_unplug=never" must be added to the boot parameters in /etc/grub.conf:kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-100.34.1.el5uek ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 xen_emul_unplug=neverAdding this kernel boot parameter makes the kernel also present the emulated drivers as it did before (e.g. the 8139cp network driver).
yum package need to be updated before upgrading previous update releases of Oracle Linux 5 to Oracle Linux 5 Update 7 using yum from ULN. Please use the following steps to upgrade:# yum update yum # yum update
In certain upgrade scenerios after upgrade Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel may not be the default boot kernel. Update /etc/grub.conf to make latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel as the default boot kernel.
Package kernel-uek-headers is available in "Enterprise Linux 5 Add ons (x86_64)" (el5_x86_64_addons) channel on ULN. To install kernel-uek-headers subscribe to el5_x86_64_addons channel and install kernel-uek-headers using following command# up2date kernel-uek-headers or # yum install kernel-uek-headersTo replace kernel-uek-headers with kernel-headers
- make sure system is not subscribed to el5_x86_64_addons channel
- remove package kernel-uek-headers using following command
rpm -ev --nodeps kernel-uek-headers- Install kernel-headers package using following command
# up2date kernel-headers or # yum install kernel-headers
Starting OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution 1.4.2-5 version (ofa package), ib_iser kernel module is not built as part of ofa package. If the ofa package installed on the system tries to load ib_iser.ko, the following message will be displayed on the console
ib_iser: disagrees about version of symbol ib_fmr_pool_unmap ib_iser: Unknown symbol ib_fmr_pool_unmapThese messages can be ignored as ib_iser.ko is no more needed.
If any of the following packages are installed on the systemkmod-cmirror kmod-cmirror-xen kmod-gfs kmod-gfs-xen kmod-gnbd kmod-gnbd-xenUpgrade of Oracle Linux 5 system may fail with the following errorAn error occured while installing packages. Please examine /root/install.log on your installed system for detailed informationto workaround this problem, remove above packages before upgrade. These packages can be installed after the upgrade.
Following messages during boot of paravirtualized guest can be ignoredFailed to stat /dev/mapper/no Failed to stat /dev/mapper/block Failed to stat /dev/mapper/devices Failed to stat /dev/mapper/foundThese errors are expected as dmraid utility returns 'no block devices found' because an ioctl to get serial numbers on pv devices returns -EINVAL."
Time utility might return incorrect system/user times in Oracle Linux guest running Unbreakable Linux Kernel. This issue is tracked by Oracle Bug 11651839.
When failed paths are restored in a multipath configuration, you may see udevd-work error messages in /var/log/messages. The failed paths do get restored despite these messages.
The default NFS mount option has changed to NFS v4. To mount an NFS volume using NFS v3 (the default using the Red Hat Compatible Kernel), use the following mount options:-o vers=3,mountproto=tcp
Please use the following steps to configure the serial console in a paravirtualized guest (PV) using the Unbreakable Enterprise kernel (updates are in the guest):.
- change the kernel boot parameter 'console=xvc0' to 'console=hvc0' in the /etc/grub.conf:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-100.0.19.el5 ro root=/dev/sd0 console=tty0 console=hvc0- add an 'hvc0' entry to /etc/inittab:
co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty hvc0 9600 vt100-nav- add an 'hvc0' entry to /etc/securetty
To set the serial console a hardware virtualized (HVM) guest use following settings in the guest:
- On the kernel boot line in grub.conf, add:
console=tty0 console=ttyS0,57600n8- add the following to /etc/securetty
ttyS0- add the following to /etc/inittab
co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 57600 vt100-nav
On some hardware, the console may appear to hang during the boot process after starting udev. But the system does boot up properly and is accessible. A workaround to this problem is to add nomodeset as a kernel boot parameter in /etc/grub.conf:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-200.13.1.el5uek.x86_64 ro root=/dev/sd0 nomodeset
On some hardware startup of X environment may fail after upgrading to Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel with following Error:
Fatal server error:
Cannot run in framebuffer mode. Please specify busIDs for all
framebuffer devices.
To workaround this issue reconfigure X using command "X -configure" and use generated configuration file to start X environment.
With Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel higher memory setting is required for crashkernel option in /etc/grub.conf file. Booting with crashkernel=128M@16M will result in following error:
crashkernel reservation failed - memory is in use
Minimum value for crashkernel option is 128M@32M. Based on the system configuration a higher value may be required. If kdump service loading fails increase the second value (32M). If the system hangs or crashes with out of memory during dumping core increase the first value (128M)
For the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, the default IO scheduler is the 'deadline' scheduler.
For the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, the default IO scheduler is the 'cfq' scheduler.
For the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, kernel.sched_compat_yield=1 by default.
For the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, kernel.sched_compat_yield=0 by default.
In some instances, large IO loads on NFS that use mmap may fail and cause the kernel to panic with
a message like:
kernel BUG at mm/truncate.c:469!
The following error may be encountered while mounting an NFS filesystem:
"SVC: FAILED TO REGISTER LOCKDV1 RPC SERVICE (ERRNO 97)."
This is an informative message and can be ignored
When kdump starts, you may see the following warning message:
WARNING: No modules scsi_mod found for kernel 2.6.32-200.13.1.el5uek.x86_64, continuing anyway
This warning can be ignored. The kdump service does get started and a vmcore does get generated.
Following message during boot can be ignored as selinux does not allow to recreate login subdir and hence directory should not be removed for dovecot:Error : "rm: cannot remove `/var/run/dovecot/login': Is a directory "
Following warnings during kernel install can be ignored:WARNING: No module ehci-hcd found for kernel 2.6.32-200.10.3.el5uek, continuing anyway WARNING: No module ohci-hcd found for kernel 2.6.32-200.10.3.el5uek, continuing anyway WARNING: No module uhci-hcd found for kernel 2.6.32-200.10.3.el5uek, continuing anyway
ocfs2 and oracleasm kernel modules will not be automatically updated during upgrade of Oracle Linux 5 as package name for these modules contains kernel version in it. These packages need to be updated manulaly after the upgrade.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel requires kpartx and device-mapper-multipath RPMs that are newer than those provided for the Red Hat compatible kernel. By default device-mapper-multipath-0.4.9-23.0.9.el5 and kpartx-0.4.9-23.0.9.el5 are installed. These updated versions of kpartx and device-mapper-multipath are supported with the Red Hat compatible kernel. The original RPMs for the Red Hat compatible kernel (kpartx-0.4.7-46.el5 and device-mapper-multipath-0.4.7-46.el5) are also included on the Oracle Linux 5.7 ISO in directory Server/oracle_updated.
The instructions for installing the versions of kpartx and device-mapper-multipath to go with the Red Hat compatible kernel via ULN are as follows:
- Get the Red Hat compatible version of device-mapper-multipath package
- From Oracle Linux ISO image
- Mount Oracle Linux 5.7 DVD
- Copy the rpms from mount_point/Server/oracle_updated to your system
- From ULN
- Make sure you are subscribed to the Oracle Linux 5 Latest channel or at least the Oracle Linux 5 Update 7 Patch channel on ULN
- Download the RPMs using the following command:
# up2date --get kpartx-0.4.7-46.el5 device-mapper-multipath-0.4.7-46.el5 mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-71.el5RPMs will be downloaded to /var/spool/up2date.If you are using yum and the yum-rhn-plugin, you can use the yumdownloader tool instead of up2date:# yumdownloader kpartx-0.4.7-46.el5 device-mapper-multipath-0.4.7-46.el5 mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-71.el5The yumdownloader tool is part of the yum-utils package and may need to be installed seperately. If you use this method, the RPMs will be downloaded into your current directory.- Boot the system with RHAT compatible kernel.
- Flush out the DM multipath devices
# multipath -F- Stop the multipath deamon
# service multipathd stop Stopping multipathd daemon: [ OK ]- Install/downgrade the kpartx and device-mapper-multipath rpms
# rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps kpartx-0.4.7-46.el5.x86_64.rpm device-mapper-multipath-0.4.7-46.el5.x86_64.rpm mkinitrd-5.1.19.6-71.el5.x86_64.rpm Preparing... ########################################### [100%] 1:kpartx ########################################### [ 50%] 2:device-mapper-multipathwarning: /etc/multipath.conf created as /etc/multipath.conf.rpmnew warning: /etc/udev/rules.d/40-multipath.rules saved as /etc/udev/rules.d/40-multipath.rules.rpmsave ########################################### [100%] # rpm -e device-mapper-multipath-libs- Restart the multipath deamon
# service multipathd start Starting multipathd daemon: [ OK ]- Run the multipath -ll command to lists all the multipath devices
- Ensure that device-mapper-multipath and kpartx are not automatically updated with newer versions by adding the following to the pkgSkipList entry in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date
device-mapper-multipath*;kpartx*;mkinitrd*;
Pirut and system-config-packages cannot be used to manage, install, and uninstall software packages. Follow the steps below to resolve the issue
- Mount the DVD iso of the desired update of Oracle Linux Release 5.
Command for mounting the DVD media inserted in /dev/cdrom # mount -r -o loop -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt
Command to mount iso image file # mount -o loop/mnt - Create yum repository configuration file /etc/yum.repos.d/dvd.repo with following contents
[dvd] name=OEL5DVD baseurl=file:///mnt/Server enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///mnt/RPM-GPG-KEY file:///mnt/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle- Clear and update the yum cache
# yum clean all # yum update- Run pirut/system-config-packages to manage software packages
Following packages can not co-exists due to file conflict
- freeradius and freeradius2
- postgres and postgresql84
- samba and samba3x
- tcsh and tcsh617
- bind and bind97
- php and php53
If updating from Oracle Linux 5 GA or RHEL 5 GA using up2date, you may encounter the following error:Unresolvable chain of dependencies: xen-3.0.3-64.el5 requires xen-hypervisor-abi = 3.1This happens because a kernel-xen package update is needed by the xen package, but 'kernel*' is part of the up2date pkgSkipList. To get around this, add 'xen;xen-devel;' to the the pkgSkipList line in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date and then run up2date. You can update the xen and kernel-xen packages together later via 'up2date --force xen kernel-xen'.
Oracle Linux offers an option to keep your operating system up to date with latest operating system patches using up2date. To access Linux updates via Unbreakable Linux Network, you must purchase a Linux support subscription.For more information please visit http://linux.oracle.com
Note: Prior to using up2date, import the RPM-GPG-KEY for Oracle Linux:
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY