2021.2.0 Release Notes

New Features

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-12728 Accelerator CS0133915 Added new usage options to nc modify to allow an Admin to increase/decrease grabbed resourcemaps for running jobs and to allow selection of jobs for all nc modify use cases by specifying a selection rule.
VOV-12822 Accelerator None The web UI dashboard page has a Counters section that shows the number of active Users for an NC queue. This counter had been 0 in past releases. This has been fixed to show the correct value.
VOV-12955 Monitor None Jobclass initialization has been moved into the liveness script live_init_jobclasses.tcl instead of vovresourced.
VOV-12956 Accelerator None Timevar definitions are now processed in two configuration files. Timevar devinitions may be place now in new configuration file SWD/config/timevars.tcl, where they are processed by the new VOV liveness script. This new config file is the preferred place for Timevar definitions going forward. Timevar definitions in SWD/resources.tcl will also continue to be processed by vovresourced for compatibility with prior releases.
VOV-13090 Accelerator CS0141521 Support has been added to allow custom values to be used for PIPELOG related ports and range via VOV_PIPELOG_FIRST and VOV_PIPELOG_RANGE. Also VOV_CONTAINER_NETWORK_PROXY environment variable has been added to better support nested container resources, see example container config file containers/c3-enter.sh for more details.
VOV-13136 Accelerator Plus, Hero None Integrated Accelerator Plus and Hero with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13137 Allocator, Accelerator None Integrated Allocator and Accelerator with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13625 Accelerator None Added new NUMUSERS field to the SERVER object. The new field contains the count of users who are currently connected to vovserver with a web or CLI client or a running job. Vovserver updates this field every 10s.
VOV-13654 Accelerator None In Dashboard UI, the server vital signs widget will have the donut under the bullet graph bars.
VOV-13774 Accelerator None By setting the new server configuration option, vovservermgr config slave.childProcessCleanupExclusions someChildDaemon in conjunction with setting vovservermgr config slave.childProcessCleanup 1, users can now specify by name named process exclusions to the child cleanup process. If set in conjunction with slave.childProcessCleanup, then slaves should kill all of a job's child processes when that job exits, except for those named here for slave.childProcessCleanupExclusions in a comma separated list. The default value if not set is empty string, "".
VOV-13806 All None The web server used to provide Accelerator products' web UI interface and HTTP interface to the main server is changed from the internal web server to nginx in this release. If the internal web server is preferred, it can be selected via the -webprovider option on the ncmgr start command. The impact to users will be that with the new default nginx web server, the REST v3 interface and the Accelerator administrator web UI dashboard page will not be available for use. If either of these capabilities are needed, you should select the internal web server option when the Accelerator queue is started.
VOV-13839 Accelerator None With the webport enabled and the webprovider set to "internal" to use the REST service, worker threads dedicated to servicing REST requests have a label of either "RESTService" or "RESTRequestHandler" This can be seen by calling ps -T -p PID with PID being the process id of vovserver.
VOV-13841 All None Added new liverecorder.mode configuration parameter for taskers that can be used to specify whether the main tasker process, the subtasker process, or both processes should generate a LiveRecorder recording file. Note that recording files will be generated per job that is executed if subtasker recording is enabled. The default mode is for the main tasker process to be the only one to generate a recording.
VOV-13947 All None The Installation Guide has been updated to include the information for the Altair License Manager.
VOV-13372 FlowTracer CS0182759 Enhanced Job status bar to show the colors for the valid and failed jobs based on their exit status. This functionality can be controlled by ::VovGUI::configJobStatusBar in the gui.tcl file. All valid jobs with assigned color will appear before default valid (green color), same for failed jobs.
VOV-13135 FlowTracer None Integrated Altair License Manager with FlowTracer for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13138 Hero None Integrated Hero with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
VOV-13133 Monitor None Integrated Altair License Manager with Monitor for both node-locked and floating licenses. Added a config key config(alm.enable) in policy.tcl to enable the ALM licensing. The default license manager for Monitor remains the Reprise License Manager (RLM).
VOV-13776 Monitor None Implemented Grace Period for Altair License Manager.
VOV-13778 Accelerator, Accelerator Plus None Implemented licensing modes 'Full' and 'N' for Altair License Manager for Accelerator and Accelerator Plus. This can be set using config key config(enterpriselicense) in policy.tcl.
VOV-13777 Monitor None Enhanced license UI to show Altair License Manager status and make changes to the current license environment.
VOV-13134 Allocator, Monitor, Accelerator None Updated Allocator, Monitor, and Accelerator with the actual (new) features names for Altair License Manager.
VOV-13617 All None The SSL implementation has been upgraded using the latest third party libraries, OpenSSL version 1.1.1.

Resolved Issues

Internal Number Products Case Number Description
VOV-12564 All None Changed default LiveRecorder log directory from . to /tmp. This mainly affects the default behavior for vovserver, whose working directory is the parent of the SWD, which is often stored in an NFS-based location.
VOV-12822 Accelerator None The web UI dashboard page has a Counters section that shows the number of active Users for an NC queue. This counter had been 0 in past releases. This has been fixed to show the correct value.
VOV-13180 All None Robustness changes to mitigate vovsh backtraces linked to query memory management.
VOV-12963 All CS0143849 Fixed issue that could cause object IDs to improperly recycle after multiple rollovers.
VOV-13950 All None test.check_TIMEVAR.sh was primarily failing due to clock skew. This fixes that.
VOV-14075 All None Fix the internal web provider's HTTP responses to include security headers. Previously, the internal web provider did not correctly return the security headers in the following case: when HTTP requests were made to the vovserver web port, responses did not include the standard HTTP security headers for URLs beginning with "/doc".
VOV-7887 All 21377 Clarified documentation of VOV_LIMIT_vmemoryuse.
VOV-14143 All None Added missing vovservermgr.bat and vovclientmgr.bat scripts to the Windows package.
VOV-13183 All None Fixed a potential memory leak when a client running a long-running query is unexpectedly terminated, causing vovserver to permanently mark a query as "in-use".
VOV-14061 All None Fixed HTTP security header setting which prevented some icons to not appear in the Altair online documentation.
VOV-13921 Accelerator None In the past, when you changed an initJobClass procedure, you had to restart vovresourced to put the change into effect. Restarting vovresourced is no longer necessary. The online help has been reflected to show this.
VOV-13764 Accelerator None Changing http.proxytimeout requires the REST service be restarted if it is already running. This can be done by setting the webport to 0, waiting 30 seconds, and then setting it back to the desired webport number.
VOV-13380 Accelerator None If the vovserver web interface is enabled by setting the web port, then under some high load conditions the web port interface would hang up. In the 2021.2.0 release, the default web server reverts to nginx, which is immune to this issue. As a result, the default vovserver configuration will not support REST v3 or the Accelerator dashboard UI page. To enable REST v3 and the dashborad UI page, a new web server option may be specified by the -webprovider internal option on the ncmgr start or vovproject start commands.
VOV-13167 Accelerator None Memory reporting within the tools has changed on Linux to reflect what's reported by the Linux kernel in VmRSS rather than VmSize. The vovserver memory usage information from commands such as vsi, vovselect memorystats from server as well as the memory web page at "http://host:port/server?page=memory" will also report consistent memory use totals based on VmRSS. Also, vovselect memorystats from server and the memory statistics webpage have been enhanced to account for more of the "chunk" based memory pool allocations used within vovserver.
VOV-13531 Accelerator None A minor appearance improvement to the web dashboard UI page was made within the Capacity sub-window.
VOV-13326 Accelerator None Changed the VOV_DISABLE_SHARED_MEMORY_LOOKUP behavior to return the RSS.
VOV-13769 Accelerator None When using the internal REST server (as opposed to the nginx server), the vendor library used to implement it was changed from cpprestsdk to Oat++. The back end no longer allocates a static pool of worker threads to service requests, controlled by the variable http.workerthreads. That parameter is now ignored. The Oat++ backend creates a new thread to service each request and terminates the thread after sending the response to the HTTP/REST client.
VOV-13638 Accelerator CS0191754 The RESD(typeList) parameter in the vovreconciled/config.tcl file can be used to modify the license types handled by vovreconciled. The parameter value is a list of names, by default the value is {License}. The following types are not supported and will be ignored if present: Limit, Policy, User, Group and Priority. The type of License will be added if not specified.
VOV-13549 Accelerator None Fixed script execution issue with message.cgi where user did not have proper permissions to modify the underlying file, UI will now display message indicating the issue and properly disable the submit button.
VOV-13561 Accelerator None Internal bug which may have caused some set statistics to not be reported accurately has been addressed in this release.
VOV-11780 Accelerator AAP24453 This release contains OpenSSL 1.1.1j which does not exhibit the warning message of the previous packaged version OpenSSl 1.0.2q.
VOV-13720 Accelerator None The header section stays sticky at the top and always be visible to the user.
VOV-13672 Accelerator None In the Scheduler Vital Signs widget, the values under the horizontal bars are now in sync with the values shown in tooltips, respectively (tooltips appear on hover over the horizontal bars).
VOV-13791 Accelerator None The REST HTTP server has a new threading model that no longer uses a pool of worker threads to service client connections. It now creates a new thread for each connection and that thread terminates after transmitting a response to the client. The vov variable http.workerthreads is deprecated. It is visible but not changeable.
VOV-13739 Accelerator None The Set Browser link has been modified to point to the classic UI's Set Browser page.
VOV-13816 Accelerator CS0205113 Address issue where license resources sometimes became unavailable when on life support.
VOV-14110 Accelerator AAP24923 Fixed bug where TaskerClass.table based resources did not display properly in web UIs extra resources column.
VOV-10345 Accelerator 24403, 24469, 24648 The following system taskers no longer consume a license: vovdbd, WXLauncher & maintainer.
VOV-12107 Accelerator CS0120865 Added cleanup of unknown process IDs which also fixes the flooding of tasker logs with the following error messages: "Must kill late child Pid...", "rakeChildren: Child process...", "does not exist anymore: assuming it is done..."
VOV-13510 Accelerator CS0182762 Fixed issue causing license checkout with empty shared (ISV) string which is resulting in duplicate license checkout.
VOV-13880 Accelerator None In the Schedular vital signs widget, the values shown in the tooltip of the buckets bullet graph will be in-sync with the number jobs submitted.
VOV-13860 Accelerator CS0208413, CS0208823 Fixed issue that caused the tasker to overload vovserver with messages when a job execution attempt failed due to not being able to successfully fork out the subtasker process that is used to shepherd the job.
VOV-9031 Accelerator 23103 A description on how to set up a tasker in Windows has been added to the online help.
VOV-13861 Accelerator CS0210064 Fixed issue in which SIGALRM interrupted communications on interactive jobs using VOV_INTERACTIVE_PING keep alive method
VOV-13771 Accelerator None When making job related REST API calls, helpful error information is included in the REST response. If using the vov_rest_v3 Python API wrapper, the content of the error will be thrown inside VovRestException.
VOV-13849 Accelerator CS0208895, CS0218919 Fixed bug where interactive (-I/-Ir) root privileged container jobs potentially resulted in a process group SIGINT being captured and accidentally being sent to systemd, following which bad things may happen, such as a system reboot on subtasker host.
VOV-14116 Accelerator None Fix a problem with changing the vovserver's webserver from "nginx" to "internal" using the vovservermgr config webprovider internal command. It was not possible to make this change without restarting vovserver, but with this fix, the transition from nginx to internal web server can be accomplished by a 3 step process: 1) shut down nginx with this command: vovdaemonmgr stop vovnginxd ; 2) delay 5 seconds with sleep 5; 3) start the internal web server with vovservermgr config webprovider internal.
VOV-13956 Accelerator Plus None Fixed race condition with Accelerator Plus that caused jobs to fail due to placement on taskers reserved for different buckets.
VOV-13785 Accelerator Plus CS0142115 Fixed issue that prevented jobs using a jobclass with VOV_JOB_DESC(interactive,useXdisplay) from succuessfully launching agents when run via Altair Accelerator.
VOV-13872 Accelerator Plus CS0211355 Fixed issue where SICK status Accelerator taskers were not removed after an appropriate amount of time. The underlying cause was that there were still related jobs running in the base queue, and was repaired by passing the -forcerunning option to the NC base queue forget command for taskers with a SICK status.
VOV-14020 Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue with Accelerator Plus in DirectDrive mode that prevented jobs from running when added to a bucket that was empty during a vovwxd daemon restart.
VOV-13731 Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue which prevented Accelerator Plus in Direct Drive mode from launching taskers for preexisting jobs when a base queue is restarted and no further jobs are incoming in the Accelerator Plus queue.
VOV-13917 Accelerator Plus None Improved logging to identify when Altair Accelerator Direct Drive feature is in use. On vovwxd startup, the vovwxd.log will contain: Initializing vovwxd with Direct Drive... ... vovwxd with Direct Drive initialization successful. During operation, the vovwxd.log will also contain the thread identifier "APPluginAccel" when running in Direct Drive mode.
VOV-13890 Accelerator Plus None Fixed issue which prevented WX taskers from reconnecting after server freeze/failover with fastexit enabled.
VOV-13650 Accelerator Plus None vovserver has a new config parameter tasker.authorization.delay that specifies the time in seconds that the server wait before authorizing new taskers.This parameter can be useful for WX, where it can reduce the latency of dispatching a job to a newly requested tasker.
VOV-13749 FlowTracer None Fixed issue in vov_lsf_agent that prevented it from launching a tasker.
VOV-8715 Monitor 22305 Send warning about nonexistent user to stderr instead of stdout when ftlm_batch_report with user filter is requested
VOV-13464 Monitor CS0174914 Added ADJUST_CAPACITY periodic maintenance task (Admin > System > Configuration Information).
VOV-13633 Monitor CS0188846 Logs containing, "Queued Programs" were not being recorded as queued requests properly for ftlm_parse_lstc.
VOV-13712 Monitor CS0195003 A denial plot showed incorrect data when the data binning size was 30s and the time span was several months.
VOV-13927 Monitor None Fixed issue that prevented ControlCenter jobs from executing on hosts that have an upper/mixed-case name.
VOV-13929 Monitor None Fixed issue that prevented the process monitoring facility from recording incoming running processes as checkouts.
VOV-7800 Monitor 21302, 23839 Fixed issue that caused the default bin interval for the denial plot to default to 30s instead of a dynamically calculated optimum value for the report time range. This caused the denials to be binned incorrectly for reports with time ranges that would result in more than 100k bins unless an explicit interval was specified in the report options. Protections were also added to prevent the acceptance of a bin interval that is too short for the report time range (any value that would result in more than 100k bins).
VOV-9665 Monitor 23904 Fixed issue that prevented the ftlm_capacity load operation from finding the data files necessary for loading feature capacity information into the database.
VOV-10568 None CS0120645 HyperThreading fieldname 'HT' on taskers previously reported incorrectly if HT was available. The field now properly reports if SMT threading (either Intel HyperThreading or AMD SMT) is currently available and enabled by checking value of either /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control or /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/topology/thread_siblings_list (or equivalent). directly.
VOV-13611 All CS0120932 Resolved issue with parsing and filtering via selection rules values that may contain uint64 fields compared with hardcoded integer values. Additionally, users may now explicitly declare uint64 hardcoded values such as vovselect name,totalspace,freespace -from filesystems -where 'totalspace>1U AND freespace>1U'
VOV-13689 Accelerator None The Running-jobs axis scale numbers have been placed with an even space.
VOV-14209 Accelerator CS0236878 Fixed an issue with temporary loss of key file license registration by vovserver when the enterpriselicense configuration parameter was not explicitly set in policy.tcl. In these cases a vovproject sanity resulted in a temporary switch to RLM licensing. Some specific low level changes made were as follows:
  1. Check for the presence of a license key file at server startup so that the default enterprise license mode will be "Off" if a key file is found and the policy.tcl file does not have an explicit setting for the mode.
  2. Prevent the above check upon every request to check licensing so that the mode doesn't switch unless manually requested.
  3. Allow for switching the mode out of "Off".
  4. Restore the mode control and license request sections in license.cgi when the mode is "Off".
  5. Rename the mode selection in the license.cgi drop-down menu to "Off (use license key file)" so that the actual value is represented along with the intent.
VOV-14180 Accelerator, Monitor   Fixed a bug that arose when SSL certificate files were added by the admin with file names correctly derived from the fully qualified host name from VOV_HOST_HTTP_NAME. The Accleratorator products would not initialize the webport and the web UI URL properly when the "internal" webprovider was activated.