gmirror flags?

[Charles Sprickman]

Howdy,

I found gmirror as I slowly work my way from 4.x to 6.x.  So far I'm 
finding it really easy to setup and use, and the abuse I've subjected my 
first test machine to has convinced me it's pretty resilient.  Great work, 
Pawel!

One thing I'm not finding documented that's got me a little puzzled is the 
"Flags" field in the "gmirror list" output.  I dug around in the source a 
bit, but I'm not fluent enough to find the answer there...

I noticed that on a newly-created, or newly-booted array that all 
providers are marked "DIRTY".  After some time that changes to "NONE".

What does "DIRTY" mean in this context?

And just a quick one, I was able to setup a mirror on a remote box without 
dipping into single-user.  It worked without issue (build kernel with 
geom_mirror, label first disk, edit fstab, reboot, add second disk to 
array).  I'm guessing this might not be recommended, but what are the 
risks in doing this on a live machine?  In my case it was a fresh install 
and I would not be seeing the box in person for a week...  so I went for 
it since I was getting antsy to try this out.

Thanks,

Charles