Wanted to comment that we also hit this issue and agree with Paul that it would 
be nice in the FAQ to at least have something like the vertical bars that 
denote changed or added lines in a document, which are seen in the GPFS Admin 
guides.  This should make it easy to see what has changed.

Would also be nice to "Follow this page" to get notifications of when the FAQ 
changes from my IBM Knowledge Center account... or maybe the person that 
publishes the changes could announce the update on the GPFS - Announce  
Developer Works page.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/html/forum?id=11111111-0000-0000-0000-000000001606

Cheers,
-Bryan

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sanchez, Paul
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2016 2:38 PM
To: gpfsug main discussion list ([email protected]) 
<[email protected]>
Subject: [gpfsug-discuss] nosmap parameter for RHEL7 x86_64 on 
Haswell/Broadwell?

After some puzzling debugging on our new Broadwell servers, all of which slowly 
became brick-like upon after getting stuck starting GPFS, we discovered that 
this was already a known issue in the FAQ.  Adding "nosmap" to the kernel 
command line in grub prevents SMAP from seeing the kernel-userspace memory 
interactions of GPFS as a reason to slowly grind all cores to a standstill, 
apparently spinning on stuck locks(?).  (Big thanks go to RedHat for turning us 
on to the answer when we opened a case.)

>From https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXKQY/gpfsclustersfaq.html, 
>section 3.2:

Note:  In order for IBM Spectrum Scale on RHEL 7 to run on the Haswell processor
*        Disable the Supervisor Mode Access Prevention (smap) kernel parameter
*        Reboot the RHEL 7 node before using GPFS


Some observations worth noting:

1.      We've been running for a year with Haswell processors and have hundreds 
of Haswell RHEL7 nodes which do not exhibit this problem.  So maybe this only 
really affects Broadwell CPUs?
2.      It would be very nice for SpectrumScale to take a peek at /proc/cpuinfo 
and /proc/cmdline before starting up, and refuse to break the host when it has 
affected processors and kernel without "nosmap".  Instead, an error message 
describing the fix would have made my day.
3.      I'm going to have to start using a script to diff the FAQ for these 
gotchas, unless anyone knows of a better way to subscribe just to updates to 
this doc.

Thanks,
Paul Sanchez


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