RHBA-2015:1300 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated pcp packages that fix several bugs and add various enhancements are now
available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) is a suite of tools, services, and libraries for
acquisition, archiving, and analysis of system-level performance measurements.
Its light-weight, distributed architecture makes it particularly well-suited to
centralized analysis of complex systems.

The pcp packages have been upgraded to upstream version 3.10.3, which provides
numerous bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. The most notable
changes are:

• New kernel metrics: memory, vCPU, device mapper, nfs4.1 operations, more

per-cgroup metrics

• New Performance Metrics Domain Agents (PMDA): NVIDIA, Linux, 389 Directory

Server, hardware event counters, CIFS, activeMQ

• New vCPU and MemAvailable pmchart views
• New pmiostat, pcp-dmcache, pcp2graphite, ganglia2pcp tools
• Nanosecond resolution event timestamps
• The pmParseUnitsStr() function added to the Performance Metrics Application

Programming Interface (PMAPI)

• ACAO header JSON responses added to the Performance Metrics Web Daemon

(pmwebd)

• The "ruleset" extensions to the pmie language
• Support for Python v3 and Python API extensions
• Support for xz compression for daily archives
• Support for long form of command-line options
• Support for active service probing in libpcp
• Support for new sysstat versions and sar2pcp fixes
• Direct support for PCP archive in the pmatop utility

(BZ#1158681)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, on IBM S/390 platforms, unanticipated formatting in the

/proc/cpuinfo file negatively affected the PCP Linux kernel PMDA. As a
consequence, the agent terminated unexpectedly with a segmentation fault when
accessing certain processor related performance metrics. This update fixes
parsing of /proc/cpuinfo for IBM S/390, and all PCP processor metrics are now
fully functional and robust on this platform. (BZ#1196540)

• Previously, the PCP pmlogger daemon start script started the daemon only if

the pmlogger service was enabled by the "chkconfig on" command. Consequently,
the daemon silently failed to start when the service was disabled. With this
update, additional diagnostics have been added to the start script. Now, when
attempting to start the pmlogger daemon with the pmlogger service disabled, the
user is properly informed and given instructions on how to eliminate the
problem. (BZ#1131022)

Users of pcp are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these
bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata relevant
to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x

Fixes

• BZ - 1131022 - pmlogger service not starting when not chkconfig'ed on
• BZ - 1136815 - pmlogextract segfaults on ppc64 when help is requested - missing PMAPI_OPTIONS_END?
• BZ - 1158681 - rebase pcp for rhel6.7
• BZ - 1188045 - pmda-papi building tricky against rhel6 papi4+papi5
• BZ - 1213724 - postfix pmda tries to setgid to postfix user and fails
• BZ - 1213764 - postfix pmda does not report mails submitted using mail program
• BZ - 1218007 - Consistent naming for tools related to LVM cache

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)