5.0 Raidframe / SMP / Questions

[Scott Long]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 06:21:50PM -0500, Michael G. Jung wrote:
> First I'm new to raidframe... but I have a few questions/problems - thanks to all
> in advance...
> 
> --mikej
> Michael Jung
> 
> The scenario - I have 20xFastWide 18.2 disks - would like to mirror two for boot 
> 2 hot spare and use 16 raid 5(4?).... I'm looking for drive space and not necessarily 
> raw speed.
> 
> I'm testing with: 
> 
> FreeBSD dual-450.mikej.com 5.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Jan 16 22:16:53 GMT 2003     root at hollin.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
> 
> 0) I've been reading the netbsd list and it seems problems exist with smp... is that 
>    the case with FreeBSD ????

There are a lot of issues with the locking semantics in RAIDframe that make
it at risk in SMP.  A lot of work needs to be done to fix it, unfortunately.

> 
> 1) "man raidcontrol" indicates that you need to set the disklabel to "RAID" if you want
>     the kernel to boot from the partition but disklabel stubbornly insists that "RAID" is not a valid
>     type...  I get this error when trying to do so with disklabel......
> 
>    "line 23: Warning, unknown file system type RAID"
> 
>    and it kindly marks the partion type to "unknown"

This broke with the disk layer and GEOM changes that happened late in the
5.0 cycle.  Even if you could label it correctly, the code to automatically
enumerate disks at boot time is broken an commented out.

> 
> 2) Does RAID 4 work?????  for write performance would this not be a better option?

I tested RAID-4 early on in my development, but haven't touched it recently.
It should still work to the best of my knowledge.

> 
> 3)  I have two drives in the chain that I get "unknown IOCTL" when they are in my raid
>     config... yet they are labeled exactly like the rest.....  this is when running raidctl -C myconfigfile
>    (yeah  da3s1e and da9s1e are the culprits)

What is the error message?

Scott