Announcing Galera Cluster 5.5.53 and 5.6.34 with Galera 3.19 with improvements to cluster restart

[Philip Stoev]

Codership is pleased to announce a new release of Galera Cluster for MySQL
consisting of MySQL-wsrep 5.6.34 and Galera 3.19, wsrep API version 25.

This release includes enhancements to make cluster restarts faster and
safer, which we will be blogging about over the coming days. It also
incorporates all changes up to MySQL 5.6.34, including security fixes.

This and future releases will be available from
http://www.galeracluster.com. The source repositories and bug tracking are
now on http://www.github.com/codership.

New features and notable fixes in the Galera replication library since last
binary release by Codership (3.18):

* A new wsrep provider option, gcache.recover, enables gcache to be
recovered at restart. This allows the restarted node to serve IST to any
other nodes that are also starting, which may speed up whole-cluster
restarts.
* An additional protection against restarting a cluster using a node that
may not have all the transactions has been implemented. Unless a node was
the last one to be shut down from the previous cluster, Galera will refuse
to bootstrap from it until explicit action is taken by the operator.
* Galera would refuse to start on PPC64EL (lp1633226, GAL-418)
* Galera would crash or enter an infinite loop in the asio library (GAL-416)
* It was not possible to set pc.wait_prim and pc.wait_prim_timeout options
using wsrep_provider_options (GAL-360, codership/galera#360)
* For security reasons, SSLv2, SSLv3, TLS 1.0 will no longer be negotiated
during SSL handshake (codership/galera#428)

Notable bug fixes in MySQL-wsrep:

* The ALTER USER statement is now replicated correctly (MW-305,
codership/mysql-wsrep#292, lp1376269)
* The wsrep_max_ws_rows variable could cause SELECT queries that use
temporary tables to return an error (MW-309, lp1638138)

New features, notable changes and bug fixes in Oracle MySQL 5.6.34:

* Incompatible change: The behavior of the –secure_file_priv option has
changed and additional checks are performed on the value at server startup.
The default value on most platforms has been changed to
/var/lib/mysql-files. That directory is created at package installation
time.
* The yaSSL library has been upgraded to 2.4.2.

Galera Cluster is available as targeted packages and package repositories
for a number of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora,
CentOS, RHEL, OpenSUSE and SLES. Obtaining packages using a package
repository removes the need to download individual files and facilitates the
deployment and upgrade of Galera nodes.

Known issues with this release:

* If using the Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial package, the server can not be
bootstrapped using systemd. Please use the SysV init script with the
‘bootstap’ option to bootstrap the node. Note that a server that has been
started that way can not be controlled via systemd and must be stopped using
the SysV script. Normal server startup and shutdown is possible via systemd.