VERITAS File System 3.5 (HP OnlineJFS/JFS 3.5) Release Notes

New and Changed Features

Chapter 1

See the mkfs (1M) manual page for more information.

• API for Obtaining VxFS Inode Field Offsets

For open source utilities, such as LSOF, to support VxFS 3.5 ﬁle systems, the library

vxfsutil was introduced. The library provides an API for accessing base/full VxFS

3.5 header ﬁle information because the header ﬁles are no longer public. See the

vxfsu_get_ioffsets(3) manual page for details.

• VxFS System Activity Reporter

The vxfsstat command displays the VxFS ﬁle system statistics, which can be used

to analyze performance and to aid in tuning. Similar to the sar (1M) command,

vxfsstat gathers statistics on buffer cache, inode cache, and per-CPU usage.

See the vxfsstat (1M) manual page for detailed information.

• Support for Oracle Disk Manager

This release supports the Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) driver. ODM is a custom

storage interface for ﬁles and raw devices that achieves a higher degree of ﬁle

administration and increased database performance. ODM features include: atomic

ﬁle naming, creation and deletion, asynchronous ﬁle I/O, reduction of system

overhead by multiplexing requests and completions in one I/O system call, and the

ability to determine ﬁle I/O attributes. The ODM Application Programming

Interface (API) is targeted for the Oracle9i release, and will be available only with

the VERITAS Database Edition.

• Forced Unmounts

A base/full VxFS 3.5-speciﬁc vxumount command has been introduced to perform

forced unmounts (vxumount -o force) of VxFS ﬁle systems. This is useful in a

variety of situations such as High Availability environments where a mounted ﬁle

system could prevent timely failover. Any active process with I/O operations pending

on an unmounted ﬁle system receives an I/O error (EIO).

IMPORTANT This command can cause data loss and must be used carefully.

See the vxumount (1M) manual page for more information.

• File Access Time Disabling

The -o noatime option was added to the mount command to disable access time

updates. This improves performance in read-only environments by eliminating

unneeded write operations.

• Storage Checkpoints

A Storage Checkpoint is a frozen image of a mounted ﬁle system. The frozen image,

or checkpoint, initially consists only of pointers to the ﬁle system’s data, so Storage

Checkpoints require minimal space. As data blocks subsequently change in the ﬁle

system, the Storage Checkpoint keeps track of the changes. A Storage Checkpoint

therefore provides a consistent representation of a ﬁle system at a speciﬁc

point-in-time by identifying modiﬁed data blocks and incorporating the original data

into its own directory structure.