Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 17:44:01 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: New Vinum alpha release available Message-ID: <19980711174401.F23241@freebie.lemis.com>
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The fourth alpha version of vinum is now available for download at ftp://ftp.lemis.com/pub/vinum/vinumdist-11Jul.tar.gz ABOUT VINUM =========== Vinum is a logical volume manager modeled after the Veritas(R) volume manager. It is not a clone of Veritas, however, and attempts to solve a number of problems more elegantly than Veritas. It also offers features that Veritas does not have. See http://www.lemis.com/vinum.html for more details. Concepts ________ As used in this document, a volume manager is a software component which isolates file systems from the underlying disk hardware. Instead of building file systems on disk partitions, they are built on volumes. This has a number of advantages: o Volumes may span disk drives. o Volumes may be larger than any drive. o By spreading the disk load over multiple volumes, it is possible to improve performance. o By dynamically increasing the size of a volume, it is possible to solve space problems without repartitioning. o By replicating data within the volume, it is possible to improve availability. o By changing the volume configuration on-line, it is possible to reorganize disk storage on-line. WHAT YOU CAN DO =============== The purpose of this release is to ensure that bugs and misfeatures in the product are found and rectified as quickly as possible. If you download this software, please use it and inform me of any problems you have. It will help to have a kernel debugger and a debug kernel installed so that I can pinpoint problems more easily. If the system panics, please keep the dump. If at all possible, I would prefer to examine it on your machine. FIXES IN THE 11 JULY VERSION ============================ - Numerous panics and hangs fixed. - Rewrote configuration. - Implement the 'rm' and 'read' commands. Vinum now saves its configuration on disk. The 'read' command will read in the configuration as it was when the system shut down. CAVEATS IN THE CURRENT VERSION ============================== A couple of things to observe: - The configuration now much better, but it hasn't been thoroughly tested, and it's possible to shoot yourself in the foot with it. If this happens to you, please let me know: it's one of the few ways I have to ensure that holes are patched. - The partitions used for vinum *must* be of type "unused". This helps avoid shooting yourself in the foot by building a vinum on top of a file system partition. If you try, you will get the message "Drive has invalid partition type". Release versions of vinum will use their own special partition type. - Volume recovery is still not complete, though enough code is present to give you the opportunity for a variety of panics. - The code contains a lot of debug aids, and it's compiled without optimization in order to make debugging easier. Don't worry about the size *too* much: it'll shrink by approximately 30% when it's compiled with optimization. The performance will also improve. - This version of vinum is a stripped-down version without RAID-5 code, and I haven't tested it in this form beyond confirming that it will compile. PREVIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTS ====================== Vinum is available under a Berkeley-style copyright. It is implemented as a loadable kernel module (LKM). This version of vinum contains a subset of the final functionality, roughly equivalent to the ccd driver. In particular, the following restrictions apply: Automatic startup is not yet complete. It is currently necessary to re-configure the volumes every time the subsystem is started. This operation does not change the data on the disks. Detection of differences between the version of the kernel and the LKM is not yet implemented. Detaching plexes and subdisks has not yet been implemented. Reintegration of failed disks has not yet been implemented. vinum requires a special version of newfs, which has not yet been committed. The current version places some restrictions on volume names. See the documentation for further information. This version of vinum will run (hopefully) on FreeBSD 2.2.6 and recent versions of 3.0-CURRENT. It may also run on 2.2.5, but I haven't tested it. Due to changes in -CURRENT, it will not compile on versions older than about mid-March 1998. Due to licensing restrictions, this version does not contain the RAID5 functionality. If you are interested in testing this, please contact me privately. Don't use this version for performance testing. I have a lot of debug code in there, some of which is quite slow. At the moment, my main concern is stability. Documentation for this version includes man pages (vinum(4) and vinum(8)) and a user's guide, currently (for my convenience) in /usr/src/sbin/vinum/doc. You can build PostScript versions of any of these by building the appropriate file (vinum4.ps, vinum8.ps or userguide.ps) in this directory. For convenience' sake, the distribution includes the PostScript file /usr/src/sbin/vinum/doc/userguide.ps. This document is intended to be formatted with troff; you can format it with nroff, but it will look funny. I don't intend to fix this. The documentations Makefile also refers to a file notes.*, which will contain technical notes when it is finished. All documents refer to the RAID5 functionality. Please ignore them for the time being. If you use this version, *PLEASE* give me some feedback, even if things work fine. In particular, of course, I'd like to hear of any problems you have either with the software or the documentation. I'll also accept requests for enhancement, but don't expect to see them in the near future: there's still a lot of code to be written. Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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