gvinum behaviour on disk failure

[Alastair Watts]

Eric Anderson wrote:

> I've had a drive that belonged to a mirrored die before, and didn't 
> notice it until I logged in to the machine and poked around, so it did 
> do its job.  I've also had a drive in a gmirror go bad, and it hung the 
> whole box, but that isn't gmirrors' fault as far as I know.

gvinum did its job in this instance as well - it took the dead drive 
plex down. After that happened, subsequent requests were all served 
successfully from ad0. But it still returned a 'fail' for the request 
that caused the fault (probably just passed the fault through) instead 
of seeing it as a fault and retrying the operation on ad0. That caused a 
process to die as the read request was for a swap page.

I'd be interested to hear more information on the gmirrored drive 
hanging the box. Were both drives on the same ATA bus and the bus hung 
perhaps?

Cheers,

Al