Improvements to gvinum and it's future

[Ivan Voras]

Ulf Lilleengen wrote:

> Now, one could ask why I bother doing work on gvinum now, since we have gmirror,
> gconcat, graid3 and all that. The reason is that gvinum is important as a volume
> manager. Ivan Voras' work on gvirstor seems very promising as a foundation of a
> new volume manager, and I've been planning to start working on utilities (fvm,
> freebsd volume manager) that utilize these new geom classes instead of having to
> maintain a separate RAID implementations, but that will take time, and meanwhile

I'm not the one with power-of-decision here, but I think this would be 
very counter-productive. I'd suggest a different approach, of which I 
had plans on actually doing, but got sidetracked - to build a userland 
utility that would use existing GEOM classes in more-or-less opaque way 
to the user (meaning: users don't have to be aware of actual kernel 
classes to do the job).

The idea was to build a curses terminal interface application (actually, 
the Original plan was to do it as a part of a new X11 installer that 
would be able to run standalone) which would allow users to graphically 
(or at least - visually) draw the graph of classes they want (e.g. RAID 
1+0, etc.) and the utility would generate the correct sequence of 
commands to load and configure the classes, and also write a config file 
of sorts (or maybe a runnable shell script) that can replicate that 
configuration, for purpose of repeating in case of disaster or on 
another machine.