What’s New in Ceph? July 2018 Developer Highlights and Key Feature Updates

This is the seventh article of the 2018 Ceph Developer Monthly series. The UMCloud storage team publishes a monthly roundup of interesting commits and important changes from the Ceph community, helping readers stay up‑to‑date with the latest development information.

Highlights This Month

Ceph object storage authentication support, CNCF project involvement, and OPA implementation for fine‑grained access control.

Object Storage

Improved radosgw-admin sync error trim Command

The community enhanced the radosgw-admin sync error trim command so it can clean all error logs within a specified range, removing the previous 1,000‑record limit. A new --trim-delay-ms parameter allows control over the execution frequency of the cleanup operation.

Ceph RGW Integration with OPA Policy Engine

Initial work for integrating the Open Policy Agent (OPA) with Ceph RGW has been merged, enabling a lightweight, context‑aware policy engine across the project stack.

Block Storage

librbd Adds FUA Support

The librbd library now optionally supports FUA (Force Unit Access) on write requests. When enabled, data must be fully persisted to the storage volume before the write operation returns success, bypassing any cache.

Unified Storage Layer

New pg repeer <pgid> Command

The monitor (mon) component added the pg repeer <pgid> command, which forces the specified PG ID to execute peer processing.

Cluster Management

mgr Crash Plugin Added

A new crash plugin for the manager daemon collects crash dump information from cluster components and stores it within the Ceph cluster for later analysis. The plugin introduces several commands:

# Enable the crash plugin
ceph mgr module enable crash
# Post a crash dump
ceph crash post -i <metafile>
# Remove a specific crash dump
ceph rm <crashid>
# List all crash dumps
ceph crash ls
# Summarize crash statistics
ceph crash stat
# Show details of a specific crash
ceph crash info <crashid>
# Prune crash dumps older than a given number of days
ceph crash prune <keep>

Enable Inter‑Module Calls in mgr

The manager daemon now supports inter‑module calls, allowing modules to invoke each other directly.

Dashboard User Management UI

A new user management interface has been added to the Ceph dashboard, enabling user administration directly from the UI.

Tools Library

ceph‑volume Batch Command

A batch command for ceph‑volume has been introduced, facilitating bulk operations.

vstart.sh Supports SPDK

The development deployment script vstart.sh now supports enabling SPDK (Storage Performance Development Kit) in Ceph.

Monthly Commit Statistics

— END —