From owner-freebsd-geom@FreeBSD.ORG Wed May 9 17:11:51 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7554316A402 for ; Wed, 9 May 2007 17:11:51 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rick@kiwi-computer.com) Received: from kiwi-computer.com (keira.kiwi-computer.com [63.224.10.3]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 178A213C4B8 for ; Wed, 9 May 2007 17:11:50 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rick@kiwi-computer.com) Received: (qmail 24646 invoked by uid 2001); 9 May 2007 17:11:56 -0000 Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 12:11:56 -0500 From: "Rick C. Petty" To: Jonathan Dobbie Message-ID: <20070509171156.GB24152@keira.kiwi-computer.com> References: <4641DE02.3000706@mcad.edu> <20070509160018.GB22504@keira.kiwi-computer.com> <4641F533.4000101@mcad.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4641F533.4000101@mcad.edu> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Cc: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Nesting gvinum? X-BeenThere: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: rick-freebsd@kiwi-computer.com List-Id: GEOM-specific discussions and implementations List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 17:11:51 -0000 On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 11:22:11AM -0500, Jonathan Dobbie wrote: > Rick C. Petty wrote: > > > > Except for the nesting, this is precisely what gvinum does. Why do you > > need nesting? Resizing volumes is something gvinum is supposed to be able > > to do. > > > I thought that it could only resize striped volumes? Would you happen > to have a guide handy? If I, say, wanted to resize usr and log to add > 20GB to log, could I drop the s0 subdisk from both, resize, readd, sync > and then repeat for s1 and s2? I'm pretty sure you can. If not, Ulf (lulf@) is working on improvements this summer. Now, you weren't expecting to be able to resize the filesystem automatically, were you? If so, I think growfs(1) might work. What I've done with gvinum is move around and "resize" volumes while the system is up. By "resize" I mean I always do a copy to a new volume, then delete the old volume. I'm not sure if gvinum has a "resize" command, although IIRC the plain vinum did. > > UFS2. It's incredibly fast, even with RAID5 underneath. > > > I used newfs and sysinstall to create all of the partitions, so they > should be UFS2, no? If you did a newfs or usied sysinstall from 5.x or later, yes. Read the "-O" option to newfs(8). > > I wasn't aware that FreeBSD supported reiser. > > > I was a but surprised as well. > > *HISTORY* > The *mount*/_/*reiserfs* utility first appeared in FreeBSD 6.0. Well what do you know... scary! > > Not really. Software RAID has been proven to be faster than hardware > > numerous times. I read somewhere that this has to do with the transfer > > blocksize or something. I haven't witnessed this myself, but I've seen > > gstripe & gmirror outperform RAID0/1 cards. > > > I'm definitely sold on software RAID for 0 and 1, but it is nice to boot > off of RAID 5 and forget that it is there until a drive dies. And you can do this with software RAID5 as well. But I understand your argument-- sacrifice speed, flexibility, and price to let the card do all the work. But also, it matters where you decide to put your trust-- some company who made a custom ASIC where I can't view or change the code versus well-written, documented, opensource software... Sure, gvinum has a ways to go to support all the old vinum commands, but it's saved me on a number of occasions already. -- Rick C. Petty