Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 08:59:11 -0800 From: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org> To: bugs@netcom.com (Mark Hittinger) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Disk striping or even RAID for FreeBSD Message-ID: <199511111659.IAA20923@freefall.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 11 Nov 1995 07:40:10 PST." <199511111540.HAA23806@netcom.netcom.com>
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>> From: "Andrew V. Stesin" <stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua> >> has anyone some of the mentioned abilities implemented for >> FreeBSD? Or: how to glue 6 1Gb HDDs into one striped or "RAIDed" >> raw device, if you need one 6 (or 5) "big" disk? >> What a _damn_ fast file server would FreeBSD become with this! :-) >> As about a "software" RAID -- I mentioned a bunch of techreports >> and various whitepapers on the subject at ftp.cs.berkeley.edu. > >Last week I was in San Jose and got to meet Ulf. One of the things Ulf >mentioned was that he had obtained the specs on the new adaptec 3985 part >which evidently supports these sorts of things. I talked to Ulf on the phone about this. I also received, just two nights ago, the documentation for the 3985. Unfortunately, the documentation I received is only enough to get the card acting as a three channel SCSI adapter and to do RAID 0,0/1 (simple striping or mirrored pairs). To do RAID 5, I'd need documentation for the parity DRAM buffer (aic7810), but Adaptec claims the preliminary Data book for the part is not availible. Getting the card to act as a SCSI adapter would take a day. Getting RAID 0 to work would take at least a month because I'd want to create a new, generic SCSI driver that could be extended to standard SCSI controllers. It could be written like the ccd driver in NetBSD, but I think that the overhead in going through individual sd0 devices would be too high especially if you had to recontruct data in a RAID 5 scenario. I'll have to think about it some more. > >This would be a terrific thing to implement - news expiration would be a >major beneficiary of this work. I already regard FreeBSD as the ultimate >web server, it is pretty damn close to the ultimate news box as well. >This would sort of push things over into the "intuitively obvious" range. Well, if anyone wants to fund such a project, let Ulf and me know. I've also lost access to any PCI machines util I can scrape together enough cash to buy one myself, so that raises the "funding cost" a little. :) > >Regards, > >Mark Hittinger >now bugs@netcom.com :-) -- Justin T. Gibbs =========================================== FreeBSD: Turning PCs into workstations ===========================================
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