# Release notes for Gluster 3.8.7

This is a bugfix release. The [Release Notes for 3.8.0](3.8.0.md),
[3.8.1](3.8.1.md), [3.8.2](3.8.2.md), [3.8.3](3.8.3.md), [3.8.4](3.8.4.md),
[3.8.5](3.8.5.md) and [3.8.6](3.8.6.md) contain a listing of all the new
features that were added and bugs fixed in the GlusterFS 3.8 stable release.


## New CLI option for granular entry heal enablement/disablement

When there are already existing non-granular indices created that are yet to be
healed, if granular-entry-heal option is toggled from `off` to `on`, AFR
self-heal whenever it kicks in, will try to look for granular indices in
`entry-changes`. Because of the absence of name indices, granular entry healing
logic will fail to heal these directories, and worse yet unset pending extended
attributes with the assumption that are no entries that need heal.

To get around this, a new CLI is introduced which will invoke glfsheal program
to figure whether at the time an attempt is made to enable granular entry heal,
there are pending heals on the volume OR there are one or more bricks that are
down. If either of them is true, the command will be failed with the
appropriate error.

    # gluster volume heal <VOL> granular-entry-heal {enable,disable}

With this change, the user does not need to worry about when to enable/disable
the option - the CLI command itself performs the necessary checks before
allowing the "enable" command to proceed.

What are those checks?
* Whether heal is already needed on the volume
* Whether any of the replicas is down

In both of the cases, the command will be failed since AFR will be switching
from creating heal indices (markers for files that need heal) under
`.glusterfs/indices/xattrop` to creating them under
`.glusterfs/indices/entry-changes`.
The moment this switch happens, self-heal-daemon will cease to crawl the
entire directory if a directory needs heal and instead looks for exact names
under a directory that need heal under `.glusterfs/indices/entry-changes`. This
might cause self-heal to miss healing some entries (because before the
switch directories already needing heal won't have any indices under
`.glusterfs/indices/entry-changes`) and mistakenly unset the pending heal
xattrs even though the individual replicas are not in sync.

When should users enable this option?
* When they want to use the feature ;)
* which is useful for faster self-healing in use cases with large number of
  files under a single directory.
  For example, it is useful in VM use cases with smaller shard sizes, given
  that all shards are created under a single directory `.shard`. When a shard
  is created while a replica was down, once it is back up, self-heal due to its
  maintaining granular indices will know exactly which shard to recreate on the
  sync as opposed to crawling the entire `.shard` directory to find out the
  same information.


## Bugs addressed

A total of 16 patches have been merged, addressing 15 bugs:

- [#1395652](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1395652): ganesha-ha.conf --status should validate if the VIPs are assigned to right nodes
- [#1397663](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1397663): libgfapi core dumps
- [#1398501](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1398501): [granular entry sh] - Provide a CLI to enable/disable the feature that checks that there are no heals pending before allowing the operation
- [#1399018](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1399018): performance.read-ahead on results in processes on client stuck in IO wait
- [#1399088](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1399088): geo-replica slave node goes faulty for non-root user session due to fail to locate gluster binary
- [#1399090](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1399090): [geo-rep]: Worker crashes seen while renaming directories in loop
- [#1399130](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1399130): SEEK_HOLE/ SEEK_DATA doesn't return the correct offset
- [#1399635](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1399635): Refresh config fails while exporting subdirectories within a volume
- [#1400459](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1400459): [USS,SSL] .snaps directory is not reachable when I/O encryption (SSL) is enabled
- [#1400573](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1400573): Ganesha services are not stopped when pacemaker quorum is lost
- [#1400802](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1400802): glusterfs_ctx_defaults_init is re-initializing ctx->locks
- [#1400927](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1400927): Memory leak when self healing daemon queue is full
- [#1402672](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1402672): Getting the warning message while erasing the gluster "glusterfs-server" package.
- [#1403192](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1403192): Files remain unhealed forever if shd is disabled and re-enabled while healing is in progress.
- [#1403646](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1403646): self-heal not happening, as self-heal info lists the same pending shards to be healed