From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 4 5: 8:57 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cygnus.rush.net (cygnus.rush.net [209.45.245.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BE02D15373 for ; Wed, 4 Aug 1999 05:08:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bright@rush.net) Received: from localhost (bright@localhost) by cygnus.rush.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id IAA10259; Wed, 4 Aug 1999 08:10:20 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 08:10:18 -0400 (EDT) From: Alfred Perlstein To: jakob@ostenfeld.dk Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Vinum boot support In-Reply-To: <19990803231512.A30831@ostenfeld.dk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 3 Aug 1999 jakob@ostenfeld.dk wrote: > > Hi BSD'ers ! > > I'm in need of some help or suggestions regarding a setup > with FreeBSD on a machine with two IDE disks. > > I want to run RAID-1 on those disks, and I'm pretty sure I > can do that with Vinum. However, it's not clear to me whether > I can make the system boot on the logical RAID-1 volume. > > Is it possible ? How ? > > The Vinum docs say it's not recommended to have Vinum directly > in the kernel (it should instead be a loadable module). Now, I > would expect that this means that I cannot boot on a Vinum > volume. Why isn't it recommended ? there isn't enough smarts in the loader to boot from a raid filesystem, my recommeneded workaround is this: .----------. .----------. | root | | backup / | |----------| |----------| | | | | | vinum | | | | | |__________| |__________| another option is using a boot floppy or another workaround to fetch a kernel off of a non-vinum drive so it can boot. maybe a floppy drive? or a spare partition on one of the disks... (vinum would have to be statically compiled in) > I have a final question with which I do not intend to start > a flame war... How can I expect FreeBSD disk I/O performance > to compare to Linux disk I/O performance ? Especially with > regards to stat() and fsync() ? (I will be running a mail-server > with ./Maildir/ support) FreeBSD's I/O subsystem is very good, there operations are more likely to be limited by available memory (stat) and disk speed (fsync) than the difference between FreeBSD/Linux. FreeBSD does have softupdates available, it's a way to run your disk system in "async" mode (directory operations are async) in a relatively safe manner. -Alfred Perlstein - [bright@rush.net|bright@wintelcom.net] systems administrator and programmer Wintelcom - http://www.wintelcom.net/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message