mdff wrote: > are there any plans to support the kernel being loaded > directly from a RAID partition in order to avoid that > annoying mini-boot-partition which cannot be raided?
WHY do you want to mirror root? keep in mind, OpenBSD has an "altroot" system in place, which will update your backup root partition every night with any changes that took place over the day on your root partition. What are you storing on root that is changing more often than once a day? Software mirroring is cheap..but it causes problems, too. It takes time to rebuild, it complicates upgrades, performance either sucks or is non-existant when rebuilding. In general, you probably only want to mirror the data you have that is actively changing continually. I spent a bit of time trying out ccd(4) mirroring recently. I worked hard to build a system where as much of a disk was mirrored as I could -- I had a root partition of 130M, and had the rest of the drive be a big mirrored ccd(4) partition which I then sub-divided. It worked... But after I set up the altroot backup system, I realized...do I really CARE if my /usr partition is mirrored up? How about my /etc files? Isn't a nightly sync more than sufficient? Not only that, if I hose something, I have a whole drive that HASN'T been messed up yet (hate to use the word "backup" with a non-rotated, non-removable media. Let's call it "Second chance"). If I'm running a mail server, I want a mirror of my mail spools, of course. If I'm running a webserver, I might want a mirror of my data and my logs. Firewall? Maybe my logs, but really, why do I need a mirror there at all? Oh, sure, you might want your system to stay running after it wuffs a drive, but if you are running an IDE system, it almost certainly won't. If you are running SCSI, it *might*, but don't count on it. Consider cheap (i.e., software) RAID systems a way to rapidly repair a broken computer, not a way to keep the system running without interruption. BTW: one other reason RAIDframe isn't in GENERIC is you have to customize your kernel in other ways, not just turning it on. From raid(4): "It is important that drives be hard-coded at their respective addresses (i.e., not left free-floating, where a drive with SCSI ID of 4 can end up as /dev/sd0c) for well-behaved functioning of the RAID device. This is true for all types of drives, including IDE, HP-IB, etc." (ccd(4), due to its simplicity, doesn't seem to care). Nick.
