HP Vertica installation error FAIL (S0310) fix

This is a short fix for the error FAIL(S0310) that comes up during the HP Vertica Installation.

FAIL (S0310):Transparent hugepages is set to 'always'. Must be 'never' or 'madvise'.

Let's go an see how we can fix this

First we need to understand why do we need to alter the Linux parameter.

What are Transparent Huge Pages or the THP ? Memory is managed in blocks known as pages. A page is 4096 bytes. 1MB of memory is equal to 256 pages; 1GB of memory is equal to 256,000 pages, etc. CPUs have a built-in memory management unit that contains a list of these pages, with each page referenced through a page table entry. Simply put, huge pages are blocks of memory that come in 2MB and 1GB sizes. The page tables used by the 2MB pages are suitable for managing multiple gigabytes of memory, whereas the page tables of 1GB pages are best for scaling to terabytes of memory. As per RadHat recommendation THP(transparent huge pages) are not recommended for Database workloads.

Now let's go and alter our Linux Operational System THP to the value of never

[root@primary tmp]# cat /sys/kernel/mm/redhat_transparent_hugepage/enabled
[always] never

So we can see that the value is set to always . We will need to edit the /etc/rc.local file and add the following script.

if test -f /sys/kernel/mm/redhat_transparent_hugepage/enabled; then
   echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/redhat_transparent_hugepage/enabled
fi

To make the changes available must reboot your system for the setting to take effect, or run the following two echo lines to proceed with the install without rebooting.

echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/redhat_transparent_hugepage/enabled