Good morning,

Does anyone know if IBM has an official statement and/or perhaps a FAQ document 
about the Spectre/Meltdown impact on GPFS?
Thank you

From: <gpfsug-discuss-boun...@spectrumscale.org> on behalf of IBM Spectrum 
Scale <sc...@us.ibm.com>
Reply-To: gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>
Date: Thursday, January 4, 2018 at 20:36
To: gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Meltdown, Spectre, and impacts on GPFS


Kevin,

The team is aware of Meltdown and Spectre. Due to the late availability of 
production-ready test patches (they became available today) we started today 
working on evaluating the impact of applying these patches. The focus would be 
both on any potential functional impacts (especially to the kernel modules 
shipped with GPFS) and on the performance degradation which affects user/kernel 
mode transitions. Performance characterization will be complex, as some system 
calls which may get invoked often by the mmfsd daemon will suddenly become 
significantly more expensive because of the kernel changes. Depending on the 
main areas affected, code changes might be possible to alleviate the impact, by 
reducing frequency of certain calls, etc. Any such changes will be deployed 
over time.

At this point, we can't say what impact this will have on stability or 
Performance on systems running GPFS — until IBM issues an official statement on 
this topic. We hope to have some basic answers soon.



Regards, The Spectrum Scale (GPFS) team

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[Inactive hide details for "Buterbaugh, Kevin L" ---01/04/2018 01:11:59 
PM---Happy New Year everyone, I’m sure that everyone is]"Buterbaugh, Kevin L" 
---01/04/2018 01:11:59 PM---Happy New Year everyone, I’m sure that everyone is 
aware of Meltdown and Spectre by now … we, like m

From: "Buterbaugh, Kevin L" <kevin.buterba...@vanderbilt.edu>
To: gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>
Date: 01/04/2018 01:11 PM
Subject: [gpfsug-discuss] Meltdown, Spectre, and impacts on GPFS
Sent by: gpfsug-discuss-boun...@spectrumscale.org

________________________________



Happy New Year everyone,

I’m sure that everyone is aware of Meltdown and Spectre by now … we, like many 
other institutions, will be patching for it at the earliest possible 
opportunity.

Our understanding is that the most serious of the negative performance impacts 
of these patches will be for things like I/O (disk / network) … given that, we 
are curious if IBM has any plans for a GPFS update that could help mitigate 
those impacts? Or is there simply nothing that can be done?

If there is a GPFS update planned for this we’d be interested in knowing so 
that we could coordinate the kernel and GPFS upgrades on our cluster.

Thanks…

Kevin

P.S. The “Happy New Year” wasn’t intended as sarcasm … I hope it is a good year 
for everyone despite how it’s starting out. :-O

—
Kevin Buterbaugh - Senior System Administrator
Vanderbilt University - Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education
kevin.buterba...@vanderbilt.edu<mailto:kevin.buterba...@vanderbilt.edu> - 
(615)875-9633


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