Announcing Gluster 6.0

The Gluster community is pleased to announce the release of 6.0, our latest release.

This is a major release that includes a range of code improvements and stability fixes along with a few features as noted below. Specifically,  this release addresses one of the major concerns regarding FUSE mount process memory footprint, by introducing client side inode garbage collection. Several stability fixes are also included addressing coverity, clang-scan, address sanitizer and valgrind reported issues.  A series of features/xlators have been deprecated in release 6.

A selection of the key features and bugs addressed are documented in the release notes page [1].

Announcements:

1. Releases that receive maintenance updates post release 6 are 4.1 and 5 as per the release schedule [2].

2. Release 6 will receive maintenance updates around the 10th of every month for the first 3 months post release (i.e Apr’19, May’19, Jun’19). Post the initial 3 months, it will receive maintenance updates every 2 months till EOL. See maintenance updates [3]

A series of features/xlators have been deprecated in release 6 as follows, for upgrade procedures from volumes that use these features to release 6 refer to the release 6 upgrade guide [4].

Features deprecated:

•  Block device (bd) xlator
•  Decompounder feature
• Crypt xlator
• Symlink-cache xlator
• Stripe feature
• Tiering support (tier xlator and changetimerecorder)

Highlights of this release are:

• Several stability fixes addressing, coverity, clang-scan, address sanitizer and valgrind reported issues
• Removal of unused and hence, deprecated code and features
• Client side inode garbage collection
  • This release addresses one of the major concerns regarding FUSE mount
    process memory footprint, by introducing client side inode garbage
    collection
•  Performance Improvements
  •  “–auto-invalidation” on FUSE mounts to leverage kernel page cache
    more effectively

Bugs addressed are provided towards the end, in the release notes page [1].

Thank you,
Gluster community

References:
[1] Release notes: https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/release-notes/6.0/

[2] Release schedule: https://www.gluster.org/release-schedule/

[3] Gluster release cadence and version changes:
https://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/announce/2018-July/000103.html

[4] Upgrade guide to release-6:
https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Upgrade-Guide/upgrade_to_6/