Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 07:33:34 GMT From: "Jukka A. Ukkonen" <jau@iki.fi> To: freebsd-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org Subject: kern/80805: vinum does not start at boot and may even cause a kernel panic Message-ID: <200505090733.j497XY6U066071@www.freebsd.org> Resent-Message-ID: <200505090740.j497e6nI065029@freefall.freebsd.org>
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>Number: 80805
>Category: kern
>Synopsis: vinum does not start at boot and may even cause a kernel panic
>Confidential: no
>Severity: critical
>Priority: high
>Responsible: freebsd-bugs
>State: open
>Quarter:
>Keywords:
>Date-Required:
>Class: sw-bug
>Submitter-Id: current-users
>Arrival-Date: Mon May 09 07:40:05 GMT 2005
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator: Jukka A. Ukkonen
>Release: 5.4-STABLE
>Organization:
--
>Environment:
FreeBSD metabo 5.4-STABLE FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE #4: Fri May 6 15:05:38 EEST 2005 root@metabo:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/Metabo i386
>Description:
Vinum module does not start properly at boot time.
The module gets loaded, but auto-start fails to bring the
configured volumes up and ready for mounting.
Sometimes an attempt to auto-start vinum causes a kernel panic.
Even when it does not cause a panic, the configured volumes
remain unavailable.
The systems suffereing this problem boot from a minimal /
on a traditional BSD partition and use vinum only to mirror
rest of the file systems.
When launched from command line after the boot vinum starts
just fine.
I classify this as a critical high priority problem because
it prevents an OS upgrade on systems which have been using
vinum for volume management.
In fact I do not think any 5.x systems should be even called
stable unless at least disc subsystems that ar part of the
distribution are stable enough for production use.
It would have been better to have marked vinum officially
broken and unsupported a long time ago. This would have allowed
people who have been depending on vinum to plan for alternate
volume management solutions.
Planning and testing for alternate volume management solutions
just takes far more time than a plain OS upgrade.
Now upgrading from 4.11 to 5.4 would be vitally important,
because support, patches, ports, and new features for 4.11
are quickly fading out. At the same time 5.4 without any
prior warning fails to handle the same volume management
that has worked just fine in 4.11 leaving environments with
vinum volumes in a limbo between two OS versions neither of
which is actually usable.
>How-To-Repeat:
Start vinum from command line after booting 5.4.
Configure a few mirrored volumes using vinum. (See vinum docs for details.)
Add these new volumes to your fstab to be mounted at boot.
Configure vinum to start at boot. (See loader.conf.)
Reboot.
And ... oops... then the harsh reality hits...
>Fix:
None known yet.
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted:
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