Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 14:14:26 +0200 From: Ulf Lilleengen <lulf@stud.ntnu.no> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Improvements to gvinum and it's future Message-ID: <20060831121426.GA27060@stud.ntnu.no>
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Hi, I've been working this summer to improve gvinum, and add features from old vinum into the geom version of vinum. Lukas Ertl have done a fantastic amount of work on it (and Chris Jones) since it started, but it's not complete. So far, I've completed many of the missing commands such as attach/detach, setstate stop, and other commands (The manpage lists most of them). I've also implemented basic functionality of drivegroups, which provides grouping of drives with the same configuration, and sort of acts as a drivepool that abstract drives further, and it can simplify volume management for larger systems. However, although many of these features maybe needs more testing, some of them also belongs in HEAD, but since I am not a committer, I need someone to help me get these changes into the tree. The reason for this is largely that le@ has not been visible for a couple of months, so the one person actually maintaining gvinum is not available. So therefore I ask for someone else to help me with this. Now, one could ask why I bother doing work on gvinum now, since we have gmirror, gconcat, graid3 and all that. The reason is that gvinum is important as a volume manager. Ivan Voras' work on gvirstor seems very promising as a foundation of a new volume manager, and I've been planning to start working on utilities (fvm, freebsd volume manager) that utilize these new geom classes instead of having to maintain a separate RAID implementations, but that will take time, and meanwhile we need gvinum up to speed. Perhaps can a lot of the concepts of gvinum be reused in a better volume manager for FreeBSD. At least this is how I see the future. My first set of patches are available in PR 99183, 99186 and more is coming from the perforce repository as soon as I'm able to split them up. All suggestions to me are welcome! I posted this on -current and -arch, and I'm sorry if this bothers some people, but it's not just a post of my patches to current and to get attention of some committers. It is also an appeal to further discussion on this subject. -- Ulf Lilleengen
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