From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 2 20:15:12 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dh198-236.dhcp.sunysb.edu (dh198-236.dhcp.sunysb.edu [129.49.198.236]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3AB8F37B502 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 2000 20:15:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from chris@localhost) by dh198-236.dhcp.sunysb.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) id XAA87511; Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:13:27 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from chris) From: Christopher Rued MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14809.20183.190794.578203@chris.xsb.com> Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2000 23:13:27 -0400 (EDT) To: xavian anderson macpherson Cc: Greg Lehey , "freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG" Subject: Re: "Defining" vinum (was: APOLOGIES GIVEN TO ALL) In-Reply-To: <39D948C3.44B4D479@home.com> References: <39D8FAA6.3C2CE669@home.com> <14809.216.377993.679478@chris.xsb.com> <39D90385.C9397AEA@home.com> <20001003113126.D759@wantadilla.lemis.com> <39D948C3.44B4D479@home.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG xavian anderson macpherson writes: > in bsd, it's; [page 279 the complete freebsd] > # newfs -v /dev/vinum/concat > i geuss you would then mount a directory to that partition; that's how > it is done in linux. > in linux, my volumes were /dev/ODIN/THOR01,2,3 etc. [my kernel is > VALHALA ;-) ] > the directories were then assigned to the volumes. > # mount /dev/ODIN/THOR01 /usr > > if i specify a logical volume (in linux) after i already have data on > the partition it is assigned to, it erases the data on that partition. > that's why with suse, it done in the beginning in the installation, > before anything else is done. > > i have been told that i have to wait until after i have installed my > system, before i can define a vinum volume. > what do i have to do? install a small incomplete but running system, > only so that i can later specify the vinum volume on a separate > partition? > > as i pointed out in suse-linux, the specification of logical volumes is > done in the initial installation process. not later! if i have to > first create a partial running system, on separate partition to create > my volumes, that means that i then have to go back and move (or erase) > the original partial system to make the partition it was on usable as a > vinum device. is this clear enough? > > if this is the process, it is redundant to say the least. I do not think that you can boot from a vinum volume: (from http://www.vinumvm.org/vinum/wishlist.html) It's currently not possible to mount the root file system on a Vinum volume. This is a chicken and egg problem: You can't start Vinum until the kernel is running, and the kernel needs to be mounted somewhere. There are at least four different possible ways to implement this: 1.Teach the bootstrap code about Vinum so that it could start Vinum and load directly from a Vinum volume. This is unlikely to be viable, since Vinum needs to know too much about the kernel environment. 2.Create a separate boot file system and put the kernel in there, then start Vinum and the root file system. This is the System V way, but I don't like it too much. 3.Create an MFS root file system. This effectively lives in swap, but there's no problem there. We'd need an easier way to build MFS kernels. 4.Boot normally, start Vinum and then mount the root file system on top of the old root file system. This might work, up to a point: you can mount a file system on any mount point, even if files are open in the hierarchy below the mount point. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this approach. In particular, you can't close all files on the old root partition, which means that you're not completely resilient. In addition, if you boot from the Vinum partition as a normal disk partition (which is possible and seems to make sense), you'll have consistency problems if you change a file on one partition and not the other, since the system sees the two partitions as separate. One possibility here would be for the mount operation to go through the vnodes for each open file and change them to point to the Vinum volume. It's likely that this will be a difficult operation to perform. Status: I'm still thinking about this one. It's the single most asked-for feature, and I'm very open to suggestions about how to implement it. So, it seems that you wont have a partial install, and then a move. You'll have a full install, and a post-install configuration of vinum for all remaining slices. As I mentioned, I have not used vinum (although I am now very interested in it), so I cannot tell you exactly how to set it up. From what I gather, what your question boils down to is: "I want to install FreeBSD, and I want to set up my filesystem using vinum. How do I do this?" Perhaps it is best to allow someone more qualified (Greg :)) to answer this question for you, as I have no working knowledge of vinum. -Chris To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message