v0.52 released

sage

After several weeks of testing v0.52 is ready!  This is a big release for RBD and radosgw users.  Highlights include:

  • librbd: fully functional and documented image cloning
  • librbd: image (advisory) locking
  • librbd: ‘protect’/'unprotect’ commands to prevent clone parent from being deleted
  • librbd: ‘flatten’ command to sever clone parent relationship
  • librbd: a few fixes to ‘discard’ support
  • osd: several out of order reply bug fixes
  • msgr: improved failure handling code
  • auth: expanded authentication settings for greater flexibility
  • mon: ‘report’ command for dumping detailed cluster status
  • mon: throttle client messages (limit memory consumption)
  • mon: more informative info about stuck PGs in ‘health detail’
  • osd, mon: use feature bits to lock out clients lacking CRUSH tunables when they are in use
  • radosgw: support for swift manifest objects
  • radosgw: support for multi-object deletes
  • radosgw: improved garbage collection framework
  • rados: bench command now cleans up after itself
  • ceph.spec: misc packaging fixes

The big news in this release is that the new RBD cloning functionality is fully in place.  This includes the ability to take a base image (snapshot) and instantly ‘clone’ it to other images.  The typical use case is cloning a base OS install image for each VM, allowing you to immediately boot them up without waiting for any data to copy.  RBD also got advisory locking support, which allows users to (cooperatively) control who is using each image and avoid situations where multiple hosts write to the same image and corrupt the file system.  There is additional integration work on the roadmap that will make this easier to use, but all of the pieces are in place for users to starting taking advantage of it now.

This release also includes several improvements to the radosgw.  On the user-facing API side this includes support for Swift ‘manifest’ objects (large objects uploaded in pieces) and support for multi-object delete.  On the administrative side, there is a new garbage collection framework that makes the cleanup of deleted objects transparent, automatic, and efficient.  (Currently a radosgw-admin command run from something like cron is necessary to clear out old data.)

On the release side, this is also the first release for which we are building RPMs.  Hooray!  We’re starting with just CentOS6/RHEL6 and Fedora 17 on x86_64, but will be adding additional distributions for v0.53, including OpenSUSE and Fedora 18.  If there is a particular RPM-based distro that you’d like to see us build packages for, please let us know!

You can get v0.52 from: