Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 12:38:35 -0500 From: Pete <pete-freebsd-hackers@toscano.org> To: Soeren Schmidt <sos@spider.deepcore.dk> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible? Message-ID: <20030309173835.GA21146@bubba.toscano.org> In-Reply-To: <200303090907.h2997lV8091523@spider.deepcore.dk> References: <20030308162453.GB1436@bubba.toscano.org> <200303090907.h2997lV8091523@spider.deepcore.dk>
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On Sun, 09 Mar 2003, Soeren Schmidt wrote: > To make it short, the disklabel problem is probably due to the disk > containing what disklabel see as a bogus label, try to zero out the > label by using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adN count=100. This is what I initially thought, but when I swapped the two data drives, disklabel thought the previous ar2's (and now ar1's) disklabel was fine. The drive that used to be ar1 and that had a valid disklabel before swapping now had a "bogus" label. (Did that description make sense?) > Now if you have a promise fasttrak its beyond me why you want to use > vinum to make a mirror... Well... a) I want to learn about FreeBSD, not the Promise controller. Until this email, I was thinking the only way to do software RAID with FreeBSD was Vinum... Now, I'm (more) confused. b) The Fasttrak controller isn't that wonderful and from what I've read, just software RAID on the card's PROM. I've also heard (and briefly confirmed) that Linux's software RAID is faster than the card's. I'm betting that FreeBSD's is comparable to Linux's. c) I don't want to be tied to a specific vendor's RAID. This machine is made from old, spare parts. If the Fasttrak card were to die, I'd love to be able to stick in a different IDE controller and still have the RAID working with little or no fuss. > In the post you refer to you have: > ar0: 29314MB <ATA RAID0 array> [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: > 0 READY ad4: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 > ar1: 29314MB <ATA RAID0 array> [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: > 0 READY ad6: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata3-master UDMA100 > ar2: 29314MB <ATA RAID0 array> [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: > 0 READY ad7: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata3-slave UDMA100 FWIW, I'm currently using a 2 controller config with each drive on its own dedicated IDE channel. The second controller is just a straight Promise controller, not a Fasttrak. > You use ar0 as a single disk and thats fine. Then you need a mirror > of ad6 and ad7 to get that you first need to delete ar1 and ar2 (which > you have defined in the Promise BIOS to get it past probing right ?). When all three disks were on the Fasttrak, I did have them all defined as single-disk, striped volumes. I needed to do this to boot from ar0/ad4. Right now, I don't know why I set the other two to be single-disk, striped volumes. When I moved the latter two disks to the second controller, they still booted as ar1 and ar2 (ad8 on ar1 and ad10 on ar2), but I had no controller BIOS to tweak. I just guessed that that was how FreeBSD treated drives on these controllers. > So doing: > > atacontrol delete ar1 > atacontrol delete ar2 Now this was interesting. I did this, then rebooted. This is what I get now: ad8: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata4-master UDMA100 ad10: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata5-master UDMA100 ar0: 29314MB <ATA RAID0 array> [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad4: 29314MB <IBM-DTLA-307030> [59560/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 > atacontrol create mirror ad6 ad7 This is starting to _really_ confuse me. Does FreeBSD have two software RAID systems? Is there something built into the ATA controller drivers that can do software RAID too? It looks that way from that atacontrol and ata man pages. Where does Vinum fit in here or is Vinum extraneous now? Is Vinum just a front-end to the ata system? I'm sooo confused... > and you get a new ar1 array thats the mirror of ad6 & ad7.. Indeed I do. > Disklabel & newfs ar1 and you are done (remember the dd trick above if > disklabel thinks the label is bogus).... Excellent! It looks like this is what I was looking for. Thank you so very much, Søren. pete To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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