Release Notes for NorduGrid ARC 7.2.0

August 31, 2026

Highlights in this release

In this long due release we include several bug fixes and minor new features that have been included since ARC 7.1.2.

Control directory restructuring inode exhaustion

The ARC 7 restructuring of the controldirectory has caused some systems to suffer from inode exhaustion. We have therefore added an automatic job directory cleanup procedure that should improve this (Bugzilla ticket 4311). Although this does improve the situation it is advised after upgrade to run:

Datastaging related bugfixes

There is ongoing work on the datastaging of ARC. Several smaller improvements and bugfixes are included in this release as a result of this (Bugzilla tickets 4315, 4312, 4311).

Token scopes

Token scopes were not extracted correctly from arc.conf, causing rejection of jobs with the requested token scope. The bug is now corrected and solution verified (Bugzilla ticket 4291).

The arc-arex service gets OOM-killed

Sites running ARC with datadelivery are experiencing out-of-memory problems on the ARC-CE. The root cause has not yet been found, although the partial fix in Bugzilla ticket 4284 is expected to improve the situation.

As soon as the root cause has been found, we will have a new release.

Suggested mitigations include:

• regularly (once every 24 hours) restart the ARC: arcctl service restart -a, this will flush the memory and keep it under control. If you are suffering from this problem, a sequential repeated restarts even improves the situation further.
• reduce the configured numbers of maxprocessor and maxdelivery, try half, then half of that if no improvement is seen.
• configure ARC using the new x509_cert_policy=any.nofile - this option needs to be tested on different OSes and we are interested in feedback.

Additional Highlights

• Support of OpenSSL 4.
• Enable altpython on EPEL 9.
• Enable SWIG 4.5.0 and drop python 2 support.
• BOINC back-end now provides accurate walltime, cputime, detailed failure messages and retrieves job standard output.

The following Bugzilla ticket have been addressed or solved:

• 4315 Log output from DataStagingDelivery is chopped by arex
• 4313 VOMSUtil.cpp does not compile with g++ 16
• 4312 the number of arc-hostname-resolvers can grow almost without bound
• 4311 jobstatus hashed directories accumulate over time, exhausting inodes
• 4309 Regression: Missing ifdef in Makefile causes link error
• 4304 arcctl test-ca prohibits updating allowed-subjects if notrunning as root
• 4301 current_processes in DataDeliveryService is racy or misdocumented
• 4297 Wrong permission of controldir/jobs after upgrade from ARC 6 to ARC 7
• 4295 Crash in "arcctl job accounting"
• 4294 arched crash
• 4291 tokenscopes limitations appear to be too strict
• 4287 ARC-exporter doubling counting number of cores
• 4286 Missing substitution for DEFAULT_VOMS_LOCATION
• 4285 arcctl service verify fails when using `authtokensgen`
• 4284 The arc-arex service us getting OOM-killed
• 4280 Should fixdirectories in arc.conf actually repair broken permissions?
• 4274 arcsub dumps core in Endpoint constructor if no execution service is provided (no -C)
• 4268 Probably 'token' or similar needs to be a valid credential attribute in several places
• 4267 arex cache cleaner 'cachesize' default is invalid, or range checking is broken
• 4265 arc clients report 'ERROR: Missing Host in Connect Element', database appears corrupted/confused
• 4263 crash in arcctl datastaging summary files
• 4247 CEInfo REST Endpoint produces malformed JSON output if ARC CE doesn't have any RTEs enabled

Documentation

The ARC 7 documentation can be found at this location.

If you miss something or have questions, please contact us!

Installing ARC 7

We recommend to install ARC release using the Nordugrid repository.

• Start with the basics: token-version or x509-version.
• Get production ready

There is also a nice ARC tutorial which you can follow if you are new to ARC.

We provide binary builds for all supported versions of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Rocky (compatible with AlmaLinux), and CentOS Stream.

Contributing

You can submit pull requests to our public repo which mirrors our GitLab repo.

The pull requests will be automatically copied over to our Gitlab repo where they will be merged into the source-code if accepted.

Getting in touch

If you need help with the configuration file or have any other questions related to ARC 6, please contact us via

• Email: (Subscribe)
• We have moved to Matrix for ARC support - you can always reach us there

Future support of ARC 6-series

ARC 6 series is no longer supported.

Note about the ARC 7 packages in EPEL and Nordugrid repository:

1. In EPEL ARC packages have their major release number as part of the package name, arc6 and arc7 packages can not be confused.
2. In the Nordugrid repository, you have to specifically enable the ARC 7 repo to get the ARC 7 update. See repository info.

Known issues

• On ARC sites running datadelivery, the ARC-CE gets killed due to OOM.

Previous releases

Details of previous releases can be found at the ARC Releases page