Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:01:09 +0100 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: BIOS limitations on size of bootable zpool? Message-ID: <4CC02B85.1050604@infracaninophile.co.uk>
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This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 2440 and 3156) --------------enigA8451D190525B3BEBD4AD15C Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Dear all, I'm happy that gptzfsloader will work with just about any zpool configuration you could imagine, but... We have an HP DL185 G5 with a P400 raid array, fully populated with 12 drives. Since there's no JBOD mode (or at least, not one you can get to from the BIOS configuration screens), the array is configured as 12 single disk RAID0 arrays. As I posted about previously, we had FreeBSD 8.1-STABLE installed on a 6 disk raidz1, and everything was happy. However, we were having some difficulty adding a second vdev -- another raidz1 using the other 6 drives. Well, to cut a long story short: eventually we did this by hot-plugging disks 7 -- 12 after FreeBSD was up and running. Everything was cool and dandy, and we had the server running on all drives after setting up gpt partition tables and doing a 'zpool add'. Until we tested rebooting. On attempted reboot, the loader reported 8 drives, and subsequently ZFS flailed with the dreaded "ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable" error. Now, we've had a poke through FreeBSD sources, and as far as we can tell, FreeBSD will work with up to 31 devices being reported from the BIOS. Is this correct, and the limitation is in what the hardware is reporting to the loader at the early stages of booting? Any good tricks for getting round this sort of limitation? Our current plan is to set up a USB memstick with /boot on it, by adapting the instructions here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/UFSBoot -- which isn't ideal as the memstick will be a single point of failure. Cheers, Matthew --=20 Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate JID: matthew@infracaninophile.co.uk Kent, CT11 9PW --------------enigA8451D190525B3BEBD4AD15C Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.14 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkzAK4sACgkQ8Mjk52CukIzsWACfUQxROivaVkiCyAAFxhjesDdQ zhUAnR1JIP9teR7JCiuWXLdas8+oWiUI =GIzX -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------enigA8451D190525B3BEBD4AD15C--
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