Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 03:07:19 -0400 (EDT) From: Adrian Filipi-Martin <adrian@ubergeeks.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Mark Newton <newton@internode.com.au>, k.stevenson@louisville.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Separate boot partition? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9904080258240.315-100000@thneed.ubergeeks.com> In-Reply-To: <19990408111438.T2142@lemis.com>
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On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Thursday, 8 April 1999 at 10:56:18 +0930, Mark Newton wrote: > > Greg Lehey wrote: > > > >>> In the case of an extended vinum, would it even be necessary for the boot > >>> device to be mounted after the system is running? > >> > >> No. That's the whole point. The boot partition does not run under > >> Vinum, so it's not failure-tolerant. If we needed it, it would be a > >> weak point in the implementation. > > > > With Online Disksuite on Solaris systems you can mirror the root > > filesystem; You boot from one of the mirrors as if it's a normal ufs > > filesystem, and very soon after booting it does the ODS > > configuration stuff to bring mirrors online and remounts root. > > Right, that was one of the alternatives I was thinking of. I believe > there's a problem (probably soluble) that you need to close all fds > and start again, since the vnodes would have to change. It might be > possible to do without this if Vinum can find its config at attach > time. > > > It means that you may have to boot manually (to pick an alternative > > mirror) if your "primary" boot device fails, but you still get the > > advantages of mirroring on your root filesystem. I actually have a couple of systems set up with manually mirrored roots. There is a gotcha that you need to wire down your SCSI devices or you find yourself in single-user mode editing your fstab with ex. Being able really boot from a vinum device would solve this, since the device name doesn't change just because a plex, drive, whatever, disappeared. My biggest grip about not being able to boot from a vinum partition is that you cannot also install directly onto a vinum partition. I found myself spreading the OS onto small partitoins on each disk, then turning them into swap or root mirrors once I have vinum partitions built. Why not just smarten up the loader to do the dirty work. It's much smaller and more likely to fit in to a bootstrap portion of the disk. As to the comparisons with HP's LVM, vinum wins hands down. Simply putting everything in an interactive tool makes, having simple text configuration files and clear terminology is enough to mke me never go back to LVM. This make is much more flexible in my book. Adrian -- [ adrian@ubergeeks.com -- Ubergeeks Consulting -- http://www.ubergeeks.com/ ] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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