CentOS7 update: google-compute-engine conflicts with irqbalance

[Tanase Butcaru]

Hello,

I tried to update my CentOS7 packages and this came out:

Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: mirror.symnds.com
* epel: mirror.cs.princeton.edu
* extras: mirror.cogentco.com
* ius: mirror.amsiohosting.net
* updates: repo1.ash.innoscale.net
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package google-compute-engine.noarch 0:2.3.2-0.1481587793.el7 will be updated
---> Package google-compute-engine.noarch 0:2.3.3-0.1488223892.el7 will be an update
--> Processing Conflict: google-compute-engine-2.3.3-0.1488223892.el7.noarch conflicts irqbalance
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: google-compute-engine conflicts with 3:irqbalance-1.0.7-6.el7.x86_64
You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

Should I remove irqbalance and update google-compute-engine or will this package be updated to a version that won't conflict with irqbalance?

Regards,
Tanase B.

[Zach Marano]

Hi Tanase,

We did make a change to conflict with irqbalance because irqbalance conflicts with the two scripts for virtio_net and virtio_scsi which correctly balance the IRQ settings between vCPU cores. irqbalance actually does not work on GCE (and other KVM virtual machines) correctly and reverts all queues to use one CPU core which causes seriously degraded network and disk performance. We highly recommend removing irqbalance if you have it installed. We will do some testing however and figure out if adding that conflict is causing package update problems. Do you have something else installed that depends on irqbalance for some reason?

[Zach Marano]

Hi Tanase,

We did find that adding this package conflict caused issues with package updates and have removed the conflict and pushed an updated package out. We still recommend removing irqbalance for optimal performance. Also, the latest CentOS images no longer have irqbalance installed. Let us know if you run into further problems here. Thanks!

On Thursday, March 2, 2017 at 2:03:28 AM UTC-8, Tanase Butcaru wrote:

[Tanase Butcaru]

Hi Zach,

Thanks for your answers!
I just did an update for google-compute-engine and two other google related packages and the conflict wasn't there anymore (irqbalance still installed).
After reading your responses, I have removed irqbalance as there was nothing that depended on it, rebooted the server and everything's fine.

Regards,
Tanase B.