1. GemStone/S 6.7.1 Release Notes

Overview

GemStone/S 6.7.1 is a new version of the GemStone/S object server. This release provides support for AIX 7.2, along with other minor enhancements and bug fixes.

These release notes provide changes between the previous version of GemStone/S, version 6.7, and version 6.7.1. If you are upgrading from a version prior to 6.7, review the release notes for each intermediate release to see the full set of changes.

Customers on 32-bit GemStone/S are encouraged to migrate to GemStone/S 64 Bit, for additional scalability and reliability as well as many important new and enhanced features.

No separate Installation Guide is provided with this release. For installation instructions, use the Installation Guide for version 6.7.

Supported Platforms and GBS Versions

Platforms

GemStone/S version 6.7.1 is supported on the following platforms:

  • Solaris 10 and 11 on SPARC
  • AIX 6.1, 7.1, and 7.2
  • Red Hat Linux ES 6.9
  • Windows 7 and Windows Server 2016

For more information and detailed requirements for each supported platforms, please refer to the GemStone/S v6.7 Installation Guide for that platform.

GBS version summary

The following versions of GBS have been certified with GemStone/S version 6.7.1, with the following client Smalltalk and platforms versions.

GBS version 8.3

VW 7.10.1

32-bit

  • Windows 7 and Windows Server 2016
  • Solaris 10 on SPARC
  • RedHat Linux ES 6.9
GBS version 5.2.7

VA Smalltalk 8.6

32 bit

  • Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2 and
    Windows Server 2016

VSD version

The GemStone/S v6.7.1 distribution includes VSD version 5.4. The previous version of GemStone/S, v6.7, included VSD v5.1.

VSD version 5.4 includes many updates, new features and bug fixes. For details on the changes, see the Release Notes for VSD v5.4.

VSD versions are not tied to GemStone server versions: both older and newer versions of VSD can be used to read statmonitor files generated by both older and newer versions of GemStone/S and GemStone/S 64 Bit.

Changes in this Release

Added Support for AIX 7.2

This release adds support for AIX 7.2, which was verified on POWER7.

Updated library versions

  • The libraries used by VSD have been updated.
  • The Zlib library has been updated to v1.2.11.

Distribution Changes

VSD is now provided only as 64-bit executables; the 32-bit executables are deprecated, and no longer included in the distribution.

With v6.7.1, the 64-bit VSD executable is included in the $GEMSTONE/bin directory, and the /bin64 directory is no longer present.

Added Virtual Memory Manager stats on AIX

The following AIX VMM stats are now collected when running statmonitor with the -s option:

FreeListSize
Number of pages in the free list. From the numfrb member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

LargePagesFree
Number of free large memory pages. From the lgpg_numfrb member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

LargePageSize
Size in bytes of a large memory page on this host. From the lgpg_size member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

LargePagesTotal
Total number of large memory pages. From the lgpg_cnt member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

LargePagesUsed
Number of large memory pages in use. From the lgpg_inuse member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

LargePageUsedHighWater
High water number of large memory pages used. From the lgpg_hi member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

MaxClient
The maximum number of pages that may be used for client pages. From the maxclient member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

MaxFree
The threshold of free pages above which the page-stealing algorithm will stop stealing pages to replenish the free list. From the maxfree member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

MaxPerm
The threshold of free pages below which the page-stealing algorithm may steal computational pages as well as file buffer pages. If the free page list is larger than this value, then the page-stealing algorithm will only steal file buffer pages. From the maxperm member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

MinFree
The threshold of free pages below which the page-stealing algorithm will begin to steal pages to replenish the free list. From the minfree member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

MinPerm
The threshold of free pages below which the page-stealing algorithm may steal computational and file buffer pages regardless of the repaging rate. From the minperm member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function

NumClient
Number of client frames. From the numclient member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

NumPerm
Number of pages used to cache files. From the numperm member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

RealMemoryPages
The real memory size in 4K pages. From the memsizepgs member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

VirtualPagesAccessed
The number of virtual pages accessed. From the numvpages member of the vminfo64 struct returned by the vmgetinfo() AIX function.

Bugs Fixed

Stone name limited to 15 Characters in Statmonitor

Previously, the SPC process name slot was limited to 15 characters, which caused the Stone name displayed in VSD to be truncated. Now, the limit is 31 characters. (#46560)

Note that while this is a limitation in 32-bit GemStone/S, it is only exposed in VSD, and the Bugnote is associated with the VSD product.

installgs fails due to incorrect environment variable

In v6.7, the installgs utility failed to find the error file due to an environment variable that was not updated. (#45907)