From owner-freebsd-arch Fri May 5 14:47:42 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from caspian.plutotech.com (caspian.plutotech.com [206.168.67.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 755E437BCCE for ; Fri, 5 May 2000 14:47:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from gibbs@caspian.plutotech.com) Received: from caspian.plutotech.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by caspian.plutotech.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) with ESMTP id PAA58901; Fri, 5 May 2000 15:41:34 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from gibbs@caspian.plutotech.com) Message-Id: <200005052141.PAA58901@caspian.plutotech.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.1.1 10/15/1999 To: Poul-Henning Kamp Cc: Greg Lehey , FreeBSD-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Support for bootable Vinum file systems: please review In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 05 May 2000 23:22:17 +0200." <3175.957561737@critter.freebsd.dk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 05 May 2000 15:41:34 -0600 From: "Justin T. Gibbs" Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >It looks good, but I think using devstat to find possible disks is >wrong. I agree. Another thing that is ugly about this is the kludge in the partition table. I'd rather see us finally bite the bullet and move to an extensible disklabel scheme. So, in order to have a bootable vinum RAID 1 volume, your partition entry might look like this: Section 0 Section Size XXX bytes Section Type BSD Parition Info BSD Parition Specific info ... Section 1 Section Size XXX bytes Section Type Vinum Info Partition is Part 0 of X parts type RAID 1 etc. Reserved Space for additional Sections Actual partition data.... So, the bootstrap doesn't need to know how to interpret anything other than Section 0 and how to skip over other sections to find the start of data. Once the kernel is loaded, a vinum interrupt driven configuration hook can scan all known disklabel entries for its sections and build its plexes on the fly. The only additional piece of magic required is stealing root away from the booted off partition, but I'm sure Greg has already dealt with that. -- Justin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message