From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 4 21:22:32 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A3A74150A9 for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 21:22:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id AAA11214 for freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 00:25:26 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199910050425.AAA11214@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Vinum Used as Swap To: bdsq@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com, grog@lemis.com Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 00:23:23 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I have a general question about vinum... I was not sure to direct it to freebsd-questions or straight to grog@lemis.com, so I sent it to both. I have set up some old SCSI disks as a striped volume. The disks were not exactly the same size but one was _almost_ exactly twice the size of the other, # disklabel da1 [snip] 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 2054864 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 1003*) h: 2054864 0 vinum # (Cyl. 0 - 1003*) # disklabel da2 [snip] 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] c: 4165272 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 2033*) g: 2082636 0 vinum # (Cyl. 0 - 1016*) h: 2082636 2082636 vinum # (Cyl. 1016*- 2033*) In order to go striped, I had to make all of the subdisks the same size, which leaves a couple of 10's of MB's unusable on the stripped plex. Now, I'm not losing sleep over these extra few MB being idle, but I have two ideas on how to use them since they are there. Define the two left over pieces of da2g and da2h as an additional plex and, 1) Add it as a second concat/striped plex to my big striped volume, or 2) Use it as an extra piece of swap (right now all swap is living on IDE drives). If I chose this options is it better to, i) Define a vinum volume with the plex and use it as swap? (Does vinum do swap well[0]? ii) Should I have thought of this before and cut a da2b partition to use the space. I've read the docs at the website and the manpages and have it up and working, but I have not developed a real feel for vinum yet. Thanks to Greg for the contribution to FreeBSD and thanks to anyone with answers or opinions on how I should or should have set this up. Oh, and I believe it is customary to include your vinum config file in a vinum mail (even if the config does seem to be working ;), drive scsi1 device /dev/da1h drive scsi2 device /dev/da2g drive scsi3 device /dev/da2h volume scsivol plex org striped 512k sd length 1003m drive scsi1 sd length 1003m drive scsi2 sd length 1003m drive scsi3 [0] I only found one off-hand mention about using vinum for swap anywhere in the docs, vinum(8), "setupstate When creating a multi-plex volume,... ...when using a volume for a file system or a swap partition,..." I personally believe some mention of the efficacy of vinum as swap, or lack of it, should be included. That's not to say I might not have somehow missed it, in which case a pointer would be appreciated. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message