Recently we have seen several SAP HANA crashes on IBM Power servers in association with SAP HANA revision 60 or 61. The root cause has been determined to be a Linux kernel bug in conjunction with a change in SAP HANA memory management.

• With revision 6x, HANA can utilize memory addresses in the full per-process virtual address space range of 4 Petabyte (previous revisions capped this at 512 Terabyte).
• While the Linux kernel bug has been addressed for some time in newer and upstream kernels, the SLES release 4.12 kernels and some RHEL release 4.18 kernels are affected and require patch backporting.

SAP note "3165087 - Hana 2 Revision 6x crashes on Linux kernel 4.12 or 4.18 on IBM Power platform" (https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/3165087, S-userid required for access) has been released to customers. The note describes how to implement a temporary workaround by limiting the SAP HANA virtual address space range usage. To receive a PTF fix, open a service request with your Linux distribution provider with the references described in the note. We will continue to update the note with relevant information.

*This blog originally referenced note 3159746 which has been replaced with this new SAP note 3165087.