2021.2.0 Release Notes

New Features

Products Internal Number Case Number Description
Accelerator VOV-12728 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.
Accelerator VOV-12822 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.
Monitor VOV-12955 None Jobclass initialization has been moved into the liveness script live_init_jobclasses.tcl instead of vovresourced.
Accelerator VOV-12956 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.
Accelerator VOV-13090 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.
Accelerator Plus, Hero VOV-13136 None Integrated Accelerator Plus and Hero with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
Allocator, Accelerator VOV-13137 None Integrated Allocator and Accelerator with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
Accelerator VOV-13625 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.
Accelerator VOV-13654 None In Dashboard UI, the server vital signs widget will have the donut under the bullet graph bars.
Accelerator VOV-13774 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, "".
All VOV-13806 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.
Accelerator VOV-13839 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.
All VOV-13841 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.
All VOV-13947 None The Installation Guide has been updated to include the information for the Altair License Manager.
FlowTracer VOV-13372 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.
FlowTracer VOV-13135 None Integrated Altair License Manager with FlowTracer for both node-locked and floating licenses.
Hero VOV-13138 None Integrated Hero with Altair License Manager for both node-locked and floating licenses.
Monitor VOV-13133 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).
Monitor VOV-13776 None Implemented Grace Period for Altair License Manager.
Accelerator, Accelerator Plus VOV-13778 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.
Monitor VOV-13777 None Enhanced license UI to show Altair License Manager status and make changes to the current license environment.
Allocator, Monitor, Accelerator VOV-13134 None Updated Allocator, Monitor, and Accelerator with the actual (new) features names for Altair License Manager.
All VOV-13617 None The SSL implementation has been upgraded using the latest third party libraries, OpenSSL version 1.1.1.

Resolved Issues

Products Internal Number Case Number Description
All VOV-12564 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.
Accelerator VOV-12822 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.
All VOV-13180 None Robustness changes to mitigate vovsh backtraces linked to query memory management.
All VOV-12963 CS0143849 Fixed issue that could cause object IDs to improperly recycle after multiple rollovers.
All VOV-13950 None test.check_TIMEVAR.sh was primarily failing due to clock skew. This fixes that.
All VOV-14075 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".
All VOV-7887 21377 Clarified documentation of VOV_LIMIT_vmemoryuse.
All VOV-14143 None Added missing vovservermgr.bat and vovclientmgr.bat scripts to the Windows package.
All VOV-13183 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".
All VOV-14061 None Fixed HTTP security header setting which prevented some icons to not appear in the Altair online documentation.
Accelerator VOV-13921 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.
Accelerator VOV-13764 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.
Accelerator VOV-13380 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.
Accelerator VOV-13167 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.
Accelerator VOV-13531 None A minor appearance improvement to the web dashboard UI page was made within the Capacity sub-window.
Accelerator VOV-13326 None Changed the VOV_DISABLE_SHARED_MEMORY_LOOKUP behavior to return the RSS.
Accelerator VOV-13769 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.
Accelerator VOV-13638 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.
Accelerator VOV-13549 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.
Accelerator VOV-13561 None Internal bug which may have caused some set statistics to not be reported accurately has been addressed in this release.
Accelerator VOV-11780 AAP24453 This release contains OpenSSL 1.1.1j which does not exhibit the warning message of the previous packaged version OpenSSl 1.0.2q.
Accelerator VOV-13720 None The header section stays sticky at the top and always be visible to the user.
Accelerator VOV-13672 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).
Accelerator VOV-13791 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.
Accelerator VOV-13739 None The Set Browser link has been modified to point to the classic UI's Set Browser page.
Accelerator VOV-13816 CS0205113 Address issue where license resources sometimes became unavailable when on life support.
Accelerator VOV-14110 AAP24923 Fixed bug where TaskerClass.table based resources did not display properly in web UIs extra resources column.
Accelerator VOV-10345 24403, 24469, 24648 The following system taskers no longer consume a license: vovdbd, WXLauncher & maintainer.
Accelerator VOV-12107 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..."
Accelerator VOV-13510 CS0182762 Fixed issue causing license checkout with empty shared (ISV) string which is resulting in duplicate license checkout.
Accelerator VOV-13880 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.
Accelerator VOV-13860 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.
Accelerator VOV-9031 23103 A description on how to set up a tasker in Windows has been added to the online help.
Accelerator VOV-13861 CS0210064 Fixed issue in which SIGALRM interrupted communications on interactive jobs using VOV_INTERACTIVE_PING keep alive method
Accelerator VOV-13771 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.
Accelerator VOV-13849 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.
Accelerator VOV-14116 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13956 None Fixed race condition with Accelerator Plus that caused jobs to fail due to placement on taskers reserved for different buckets.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13785 CS0142115 Fixed issue that prevented jobs using a jobclass with VOV_JOB_DESC(interactive,useXdisplay) from succuessfully launching agents when run via Altair Accelerator.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13872 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-14020 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13731 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13917 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.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13890 None Fixed issue which prevented WX taskers from reconnecting after server freeze/failover with fastexit enabled.
Accelerator Plus VOV-13650 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.
FlowTracer VOV-13749 None Fixed issue in vov_lsf_agent that prevented it from launching a tasker.
Monitor VOV-8715 22305 Send warning about nonexistent user to stderr instead of stdout when ftlm_batch_report with user filter is requested
Monitor VOV-13464 CS0174914 Added ADJUST_CAPACITY periodic maintenance task (Admin > System > Configuration Information).
Monitor VOV-13633 CS0188846 Logs containing, "Queued Programs" were not being recorded as queued requests properly for ftlm_parse_lstc.
Monitor VOV-13712 CS0195003 A denial plot showed incorrect data when the data binning size was 30s and the time span was several months.
Monitor VOV-13927 None Fixed issue that prevented ControlCenter jobs from executing on hosts that have an upper/mixed-case name.
Monitor VOV-13929 None Fixed issue that prevented the process monitoring facility from recording incoming running processes as checkouts.
Monitor VOV-7800 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).
Monitor VOV-9665 23904 Fixed issue that prevented the ftlm_capacity load operation from finding the data files necessary for loading feature capacity information into the database.
None VOV-10568 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.
All VOV-13611 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'
Accelerator VOV-13689 None The Running-jobs axis scale numbers have been placed with an even space.
Accelerator VOV-14209 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.
Accelerator, Monitor VOV-14180   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 Accelerator products would not initialize the webport and the web UI URL properly when the "internal" webprovider was activated.
Accelerator VOV-14220 None Fixed issue that could result in a leak of a file descriptor in the tasker for an interactive job that has ended.
Accelerator VOV-14221 CS0221756, CS0238663 Fixed issue that could result in a leak of a file descriptor in the tasker for an interactive job that has ended. The resulting build up of old file descriptors was making the tasker (vovtaskerroot process) go into a "sick" state.