HP IO Accelerator Driver and Management Software Version 2.2.1 Release Notes

Change log 10
• General availability
• Support newer Linux kernels
Windows® operating systems
• General availability
ESX
• General availability
New features
• The firmware file is upgraded to Version 101583.
• Device longevity is improved.
• Trim/Discard is enabled by default. For more information, see "Trim support (on page 10)."
• The fio-bugreport utility is improved for Windows® operating systems.
• The handling of timeout in the kfio_config.sh driver build script for Linux is improved. Builds are
less likely to fail on heavily loaded systems.
• Fine tuning options for preallocate mode are included.
• The default fio_dev_wait_timeout_secs is changed from 3 to 30 for Linux. The driver now waits
longer for /dev/fio* devices to display. This can be bad for systems not using udev (embedded).
These systems might need to set back to a smaller value.
Trim support
With driver Version 2.2.0 and later, Trim (also known as Discard) is enabled by default on Linux and
Windows operating systems. Trim addresses an issue unique to solid-state storage. When a user deletes a
file, the device does not recognize that it can reclaim the space. Instead the device assumes the data is valid.
Trim is a feature on newer filesystem releases. It informs the device of logical sectors that no longer contain
valid user data. This feature enables the wear-leveling software to reclaim that space as reserve to handle
future write operations.
NOTE: Only Linux and Windows® operating systems currently support Trim/Discard.
Discard (Trim) on Linux
Discard is enabled by default in the Linux IO Accelerator driver Version 2.2.0 and later. However, for
discard to be implemented, the Linux distribution must support this feature and discard must be turned on. If
your Linux distribution supports discard, and discard is enabled on the system, then discard is implemented
on your IO Accelerator device.
Under Linux, discards are not limited to being created by the filesystem. Discard requests can also be
generated directly from userspace applications using the kernels discard ioctl.