Unless you have the most current PROM, the kernel may fail to boot during the installation procedure. The prom RPM is proprietary software on the SGI ProPack 5 CD in SGI/RPMS directory.

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Note: Systems running SLES10 and SGI ProPack 5 should use PROM 1.3 (or later) for systems, such as, the Altix 4700 with the next generation SHub ASIC, or PROM 4.53 (or later) which ship with SGI ProPack 5. SGI Altix software support contract customers can download the latest PROM version from the following area on Supportfolio: https://support.sgi.com/browse_request/suse_patch_browse_results

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The operation of the YaST Installation Tool has changed significantly with the SLES10 release. For more information, see the SGI ProPack 5 for Linux Start Here.

In SLES10, the crond daemon is Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) aware. The /etc/pam.d/crond file is for PAM and crond.

You can add the pam_job.so to the crond file. If you want to control all entry points at the same time, you can use the common-session PAM file. The common-session PAM configuration file is included in most PAM configurations and includes login, crond, sshd, and so on. For more information, see the /usr/share/doc/packages/job/README file.

The cpuset implementation has changed for SGI ProPack 5, as follows:

For detailed information, see Chapter 5, “Cpusets on SGI ProPack 5 for Linux” in the Linux Resource Administration Guide . You can also find information at the following location:

/usr/share/doc/packages/cpuset/cpuset.html

The Comprehensive System Accounting (CSA) software has been updated. The CSA-3.0.0 version is a major cleanup of CSA and removes unsupported CSA record types, simplifies the /etc/csa.conf configuration file, and makes changes to header files. As a result of these changes, all user applications need to be recompiled. CSA-3.0.0 still supports accounting data files created in earlier version; however, CSA utilities from earlier releases can not read accounting data files created by CSA-3.0.0 and later.

The secure version of Array Services is built to make use of secure sockets layer (SSL) and secure shell (SSH) is new for the SGI ProPack 5 release. The “Secure Array Services” section in Chapter 3, “Array Services” of the Linux Resource Administration Guide describes the differences between standard Array Services (arraysvcs) and Secure Array Services (sarraysvcs ).

Standard Array Services is installed by default on an SGI ProPack 5 system. To install Secure Array Services, use the YaST Software Management and use the Filter->search function to search for secure array services by name (sarraysvcs).

REACT Real-Time for Linux has changed for SGI ProPack 5, as follows:

For more information about changes to REACT Real-Time for Linux, see the REACT Real-Time for Linux Programmer's Guide. Information about the new SGI Linux Trace feature is described in Chapter 10, “SGI Linux Trace”.

A Direct Access Programming Library (DAPL), new for the SGI ProPack 5 release, is provided for high performance communication between processes on single host or partitioned Altix system. This can be used with Intel Message Passing Interface (MPI) via the remote direct memory access (RDMA) MPI device. See dapl_xpmem(3) for more information.

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Note: For the SGI ProPack 5 release, only single host systems are supported. Partitioned systems support is planned for a future Service Pack release.

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Ethernet persistent behavior changes in the SGI ProPack 5 for Linux from prior releases.

The basic change is that the first time a SGI ProPack 5 system is booted after installation, a udev rule defined in the /etc/udev/rules.d/31-net_create_names.rules file is invoked that enumerates all of the Ethernet devices on the system. It then writes another rule file called /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules . This file contains a mapping of the media access control (MAC) addresses to Ethernet IP addresses. A specific physical interface is always mapped to the same Ethernet address. For more information, see the “Persistent Network Interface Names” section in Chapter 1, “Configuring Your System” of the Linux Configuration and Operations Guide.

The tmpfs filesystem memory allocations have changed for the SGI ProPack 5 release. Prior to the SGI ProPack 5 release, allocations were always done round-robin on all nodes. With SGI ProPack 5, this is now a tmpfs mount option. For more information, see the “Filesystems Changes” section in Chapter 1, “Configuring Your System” of the Linux Configuration and Operations Guide.

In SLES10, the /dev directory is no longer persistent. In SLES9, the /dev directory was part of the root filesystem and although udev managed it, if you created your own device file, it was persistent. In SLES10, /dev is a tmpfs filesystem that starts fresh with each reboot.

XSCSI naming is available on SGI ProPack 5 systems. See the “XSCSI Naming Systems on SGI ProPack Systems” section in Chapter 1, “Configuring Your System” of the Linux Configuration and Operations Guide for a discussion of XSCSI names on non-blade systems and domain-based XSCSI names.

There are three files in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory that can be modified to make systems boot faster that have many logical unit numbers (LUNs) for attached SCSI devices (1000 LUNS or more), as follows:

This section describes these rules.

SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="0|7|14", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe sd_mod"
SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="1", SYSFS{vendor}=="On[sS]tream", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe osst"
SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="1", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe st"                              
SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="[45]", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe sr_mod"                       
SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe sg"

#SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="0|7|14", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe sd_mod"
#SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="1", SYSFS{vendor}=="On[sS]tream", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe osst"
#SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="1", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe st"                              
#SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{type}=="[45]", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe sr_mod"                       
#SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_device", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe sg"

# This rule creates sg symlinks for all SCSI devices (/dev/xscsi/pci..../sg)
KERNEL=="sg*", PROGRAM="/sbin/udev_xscsi %p", SYMLINK+="%c"

# This rule creates symlinks for entire disks/luns (/dev/xscsi/pci..../disc)
KERNEL=="sd*[a-z]", PROGRAM="/sbin/udev_xscsi %p", SYMLINK+="%c"

# This rule creates symlinks for disk partitions (/dev/xscsi/pci..../partX)
KERNEL=="sd*[a-z]*[0-9]", PROGRAM="/sbin/udev_xscsi %p", SYMLINK+="%c"

By default, in SLES10, XFS uses write barriers if supported on the target device. Write barriers are used to ensure that the journaled log is physically written to the disk and not kept in the disk's cache; this risks filesystem corruption if power is suddenly lost.

Most modern SCSI and SATA disks will support write barriers. This can be confirmed by checking the dmesg(8) command output for the disk driver should show something similar to the following:

"SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back"

You can also use the following command:

% sginfo -c /dev/sda | grep -i 'write cache'

Be aware that at this time, XVM does not support write barriers and XFS will fall back to the old behavior when the write barrier request fails.

Write barriers should not be enabled on storage that has battery backed and mirrored write caching, such as the SGI TP9300, the SGI TP9700 and InfiniteStorage 4000 RAID. These RAIDs are designed to write all cached data to disk before battery power runs out and write barriers will unnecessarily impact write performance.

Write barriers can be disabled with the nobarrier mount option.

The first time you mount the device, check the syslog file. If the device does not support barriers, you will see a message similar to the following:

Jul 12 15:34:01 budgie kernel: Filesystem "xvm-0": Disabling barriers, not  supported by the underlying device

Jun  5 22:44:24 budgie kernel: Filesystem "dm-1": Disabling barriers, not supported with external log device 

The section describes unaligned access warnings in SLES10, as follows:

SLES10 contains two kernel variants for ia64 systems, based on the same 2.6.16.x source, called kernel-default and kernel-debug.

For more information, see the “SLES10 Kernels” section in Chapter 2, “Software Planning and Installation” of the SGI ProPack 5 for Linux Start Here.