XFS “nobarrier” option is now more than deprecated

XFS nobarrier mount option became deprecate

Starting with SLES 12 SP4 the xfs mount option “nobarrier” becomes deprecated.
But before xfs completely removed these option, there was an initial period of several years where the option was being still recognized but ignored. This means that it was still possible to set the option but without any impact.

There was a warning written to the dmesg logs:

[167741.081331] XFS (sdb): nobarrier option is deprecated, ignoring.

XFS nobarrier is now removed completely

The option has been removed completely starting with SLES 15 SP2.  Instead of a warning the mount now fails because the option is not longer know.

# mount -t xfs -o nobarrier /dev/sdb1 /mnt
 mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or ...

The dmesg log now shows:

[ 239.932507] XFS (sdb): unknown mount option [nobarrier].

Avoiding broken systems after upgrade

The fact that the option is not longer recognized could also cause problems after an upgrade. Imaging the option is set in /etc/fstab on an older system.  Upgrading this system will keep the option and will run into an error because “nobarrier”  is now an unknown option.

Please check all fstab entries, mount units, autofs entries, scripts, etc. for that option before you do an upgrade.

More information about this topic can be found here:

TID 20240 – XFS “nobarrier” option has been completely deprecated starting from SLES15 SP2

Related SAP Notes are also update:

2578899 – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15: Installation Note

2684254 – SAP HANA DB: Recommended OS settings for SLES 15 / SLES for SAP Applications 15