[gpfsug-discuss] Meltdown, Spectre, and impacts on GPFS

[IBM Spectrum Scale]

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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From:	"Buterbaugh, Kevin L" <Kevin.Buterbaugh at Vanderbilt.Edu>
To:	gpfsug main discussion list <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
Date:	01/04/2018 01:11 PM
Subject:	[gpfsug-discuss] Meltdown, Spectre, and impacts on GPFS
Sent by:	gpfsug-discuss-bounces at 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.Buterbaugh at vanderbilt.edu - (615)875-9633


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