Supported Linux Kernels

Simplyblock is built upon NVMe over Fabrics. Hence, it requires a Linux kernel with NVMe and NVMe-oF support.

As a general rule, every Linux kernel 5.19 or later is expected to work, as long as the kernel modules for NVMe (nvme), NVMe over Fabrics (nvme-of), and NVMe over TCP (nvme-tcp) are available. In most cases, the latter two kernel modules need to be loaded manually or persisted. Please see the Bare Metal or Virtualized (Linux) installation section on how to do this.

The following kernels are known to be compatible and tested. Additional kernel versions may work but are untested.

OS	Linux Kernel	Prerequisite
Red Hat Enterprise Linux	4.18.0-xxx Kernel on x86_64	modprobe nvme-tcp
Amazon Linux 2	Kernel 5.10 AMI 2.0.20230822.0	modprobe nvme-tcp
Amazon Linux 2023	2023.1.20230825.0 x86_64 HVM kernel-6.1	modprobe nvme-tcp

Warning

Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023 have a bug with NVMe over Fabrics Multipathing. That means that NVMe over Fabrics on any Amazon Linux operates in a degraded state with the risk of connection outages. As an alternative, multipathing must be configured using the Linux Device Manager (dm) via DM-MPIO. Use the following DM-MPIO configuration:

cat /etc/multipath.conf defaults { polling_interval 1 user_friendly_names yes find_multipaths yes enable_foreign nvme checker_timeout 3 failback immediate max_polling_interval 3 detect_checker yes }

devices { device { vendor "NVMe" product ".*" path_grouping_policy group_by_prio path_selector "service-time 0" failback "immediate" no_path_retry "queue" hardware_handler "1 ana" } }

blacklist { }