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Date:      Sat, 13 Dec 2003 08:33:57 -0500 (EST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
To:        Thierry Herbelot <thierry@herbelot.com>
Cc:        Tim Bishop <tim-lists@bishnet.net>
Subject:   Re: syncer panic
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1031213083005.27754L-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <200312131134.19270.thierry@herbelot.com>

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On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Thierry Herbelot wrote:

> Le Saturday 13 December 2003 11:11, Tim Bishop a =E9crit :
> >
> > As I've said, I am using vinum to mirror my swap. However, I set dumpde=
v
>=20
> Vinum to mirror also the swap ? Please explain what you are trying to
> achieve ?=20

Presumably uptime via fault tolerance: the goal of putting swap and
temporary storage on a mirrored array is to avoid a single disk failure
from taking you down.  Losing your swap partition can have disastrous
consequences on any data stored in the partition, including application
data...  That said, I believe the problem being experienced here is that
the swap subsystem currently expects to talk to a GEOM object, and when it
looks at Vinum it finds a non-GEOM object.  This can probably be worked
around by tricking GEOM into sticking a GEOM wrapper on the Vinum
partition you want to use for swap, such as using a Vinum partition as
backing for a vnode-backed md device.  That said, I can't reach my test
boxes at work that I use for occasional Vinum testing due to a firewall
outage, so I can't test it right this moment.  The long-term fix is to
make GEOM speak the disk(9) API at the top end, rather than the character
device API.=20

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research



> I built a fully-mirrored machine (to check what the handbook said about=
=20
> booting from a mirrored root), but /tmp was still a simply striped partit=
ion=20
> (no mirror), like swap, where I left the OS swap manager use two partitio=
ns,=20
> like you could do when having two non-vinumed disks :
> in /etc/fstab :
> /dev/ad0s3b     none        swap    sw      0   0
> /dev/ad2s3b     none        swap    sw      0   0
>=20
> With this kind of setup, all important data are (suposed to be) written t=
o=20
> both physical disks, and all remaining info will be lost in case of a=20
> failure.
>=20
> =09TfH
>=20
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"
>=20



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