Joachim Schipper wrote:
On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 04:10:54PM -0600, Damian Wiest wrote:
I've had the misfortune of running AIX for a short time and am aware of
how Veritas Volume Manager encapsulates disks, but what's the
equivalent in OpenBSD? One benefit of those systems is that they allow
you to resize filesystems on the fly, which is helpful if you're not
sure how much space you're going to need. I sometimes end up performing
two installs. The first one lets me see how much space the OS
distribution is likely to occupy and I then use those numbers when I redo
the install.
If you want to do the same in OpenBSD, allocate the maximum number of
partitions and run ccd devices over appropriate subsets of the
partitions. (Note growfs(8); there is no shrinkfs, though.)
If this is not granular enough, add one ccd device per partition, and
parition that one again [1]. This setup would allow dividing a disk in
15x15 = 255 not necessarily equally big slices, which Should Be Enough
^^^^^^^^^^^ oops
For Everyone. (If not, repeat.)
Interesing thought. Fragmented filesystems (not just files). Probably
horrible in many ways and easy to make mistakes, but still interesting.
But why not just start with a reasonably sized partition per ccd and
then add additional partitions (of varied sizes) when needed? I see no
need to predefine the partitions. Then, should you run out of
partitions, you could make the last one (p?) use the rest of the disk
and split it using the technique mentioned above.
You'll probably want to build a custom kernel to increase the number of
ccd devices. And wash your hands.
Joachim
[1] This is possible, but I haven't tested either performance or
stability of this setup.
