Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 18:02:54 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Vinum alpha 0.02 available Message-ID: <19980515180254.H1953@freebie.lemis.com>
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15 May 1998 The second alpha version of vinum is now available for download at ftp://ftp.lemis.com/pub/vinum/vinum-0.02.tar.gz. ABOUT VINUM =========== Vinum is a logical volume manager modeled after the Veri- tas(R) volume manager. It is not a clone of Veritas, howev- er, and attempts to solve a number of problems more elegant- ly than Veritas. It also offers features that Veritas does not have. This guide explains how to install and configure Vinum on a FreeBSD system. See also the technical notes and the man pages Vinum(4) and Vinum(8). Concepts ________ As used in this document, a volume manager is a software component which isolates file systems from the underlying disk hardware. Instead of building file systems on disk partitions, they are built on volumes. This has a number of advantages: o Volumes may span disk drives. o Volumes may be larger than any drive. o By spreading the disk load over multiple volumes, it is possible to improve performance. o By dynamically increasing the size of a volume, it is pos- sible to solve space problems without repartitioning. o By replicating data within the volume, it is possible to improve availability. o By changing the volume configuration on-line, it is possi- ble to reorganize disk storage on-line. FIXES IN VERSION 0.02 ===================== - Fix the source format to conform with style(9) - Improve some configuration file checking. This version is not quite as likely to cause the system to spontaneously reboot. - resetconfig no longer causes the system to drop into the debugger on the next create command - I have included a .gdbinit file for testing, if you want to do this. I haven't documented how to do it yet. Contact me or wait a day or two if you want to use this feature. CAVEATS IN THE CURRENT VERSION ============================== A couple of things to observe: - The configuration is not really up to scratch. I know this, but I plan to leave many fixes until I have attained the more basic goal of stable operation. - The partitions used for vinum *must* be of type "unused". This helps avoid shooting yourself in the foot by building a vinum on top of a file system partition. If you try, you will get the message "Drive has invalid partition type". PREVIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTS ====================== Vinum is available under a Berkeley-style copyright. It is implemented as a loadable kernel module (LKM). This version of vinum contains a subset of the final functionality, roughly equivalent to the ccd driver. In particular, the following restrictions apply: Automatic startup is not yet complete. It is currently necessary to re-configure the volumes every time the subsystem is started. This operation does not change the data on the disks. Detection of differences between the version of the kernel and the LKM is not yet implemented. Detaching plexes and subdisks has not yet been implemented. Reintegration of failed disks has not yet been implemented. vinum requires a special version of newfs, which has not yet been committed. The current version places some restrictions on volume names. See the documentation for further information. This version of vinum will run (hopefully) on FreeBSD 2.2.6 and recent versions of 3.0-CURRENT. It may also run on 2.2.5, but I haven't tested it. Due to changes in -CURRENT, it will not compile on versions older than about mid-March 1998. Due to licensing restrictions, this version does not contain the RAID5 functionality. If you are interested in testing this, please contact me privately. Don't use this version for performance testing. I have a lot of debug code in there, some of which is quite slow. At the moment, my main concern is stability. Documentation for this version includes man pages (vinum(4) and vinum(8)) and a user's guide, currently (for convenience) in /usr/src/sbin/vinum/doc. You can build PostScript versions of any of these by building the appropriate file (vinum4.ps, vinum8.ps or userguide.ps) in this directory. For convenience' sake, the distribution includes the PostScript file /usr/src/sbin/vinum/doc/userguide.ps. This document is intended to be formatted with troff; you can format it with nroff, but it will look funny. I don't intend to fix this. The documentations Makefile also refers to a file notes.*, which will contain technical notes when it is finished. All documents refer to the RAID5 functionality. Please ignore them for the time being. If you use this version, *PLEASE* give me some feedback, even if things work fine. In particular, of course, I'd like to hear of any problems you have either with the software or the documentation. I'll also accept requests for enhancement, but don't expect to see them in the near future: there's still a lot of code to be written. Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> 15 May 1998 -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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