From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Feb 2 04:25:05 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7596916A4CE for ; Wed, 2 Feb 2005 04:25:05 +0000 (GMT) Received: from ox.eicat.ca (ox.eicat.ca [66.96.30.35]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 06B9D43D48 for ; Wed, 2 Feb 2005 04:25:05 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dgilbert@daveg.ca) Received: by ox.eicat.ca (Postfix, from userid 66) id 7196FD819; Tue, 1 Feb 2005 23:25:04 -0500 (EST) Received: by canoe.dclg.ca (Postfix, from userid 101) id 395B7636B; Tue, 1 Feb 2005 23:25:02 -0500 (EST) From: David Gilbert MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <16896.22046.191392.824042@canoe.dclg.ca> Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 23:25:02 -0500 To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailer: VM 7.17 under 21.4 (patch 16) "Corporate Culture" XEmacs Lucid Subject: Geom RAID root report. X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 04:25:05 -0000 Before making this machine, I did a search on the lists to see if anyone else had questions or was willing to report on using a GEOM RAID root device. Nobody had. So... here's the basic recipe. First I did a minimal install to one of the two disks in a 512M root. I think 256M would be enough for that, but the disks are just so bloody huge. Anyways... then I booted from the fix-it CD to try to mirror up the 'a' partition. Gmirror on the fix-it CD appears to be impotent. It appears to have only 'help', 'list', 'load' and 'unload' as commands. Not useful. Since I had a few spare disks around, I loaded a default load onto one and tried again. The disklabel created by sysinstall had the 'a' pertition starting at 0. Creating a gmirror starting at the beginning of a disk or ending at the end seems to break things, and it did here. Gmirror (the kernel module) seems to find the provider as the parent (say ad4s1) instead of the child (ad4s1a). So I used 'dump' to image 'a' and then I relabeled and repartioned the disk to start 'a' at block 64. gmirror on this worked and formatting it and restoring to it are fine. Now... you do need to mount this filesystem and edit a few things. geom_mirror_load=YES needs to be in /boot/loader.conf Your fstab will likely need to look like: # Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# /dev/mirror/cs-swap none swap sw 0 0 /dev/mirror/cs-root / ufs rw 1 1 /dev/mirror/cs-var /var ufs rw 2 2 /dev/mirror/cs-usr /usr ufs rw 2 2 ... obviously substituting your own geom mirror names. Note that using a geom swap requires swapoff="YES" in /etc/rc.conf But otherwise, this all seems to work ... even without the nasty recalculation of the fake 'a' partition required by vinum. Dave. -- ============================================================================ |David Gilbert, Independent Contractor. | Two things can only be | |Mail: dave@daveg.ca | equal if and only if they | |http://daveg.ca | are precisely opposite. | =========================================================GLO================