geom - help ...

[Rick C. Petty]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 09:33:19AM -0500, Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
> I personally like 
> a full blown volume manager, and gvinum is the closest we have.  It 
> needs some work to be really good.  To me, gvinum is a different tool 
> for different class of job than the g* tools.  They overlap quite a bit, 
> but they still fill different needs.

I completely agree with you.

> It's different - and simplicity is worth something to some people.  The 
> mirror rebuilding issue is I believe fixed now - Pawel can comment on 
> that better though.  Did you submit a bug report for that?

I find it difficult to submit PRs for errors I find in production systems.
I don't always have the time to locate the culprit, and I haven't been
using gmirror on non-production systems (for obvious reasons).  I'm setting
up a test box for stuff like this so I can report gvinum and gmirror
problems if I notice them on my production boxes.

> What I'd like to see personally, is an 'fvm' that uses the same tools or 
> functions as the g* tools, but has the volume management of gvinum, so 
> you can use the fvm to manage the entire view of all volumes, but you 
> could also use gmirror to do the regular gmirror stuff like normal, 
> without breaking things in the fvm.  This way, you could take a 
> gmirrored volume, and import it into fvm, and then add a hot spare, etc. 

I'd love to see that too!  Then I can scoff at my Linux friends :-P

> I say, if you have an itch, try to scratch it - what I mean is, if it's 
> something you feel passionately about, then either help support it with 
> code, docs, bug reports, etc, or write something better.  If you can't 
> code, then start getting the docs and structure written down, and get 
> developers to look at it.  If it's well thought out, then you can 
> probably find somebody to help you code it up.

It's always a matter of having enough time.  It's a catch 22-- if you have
a bit of extra time and run into a panic, you may use up that time just
recovering the system.  If the problem doesn't hit you, there's nothing
to spend your time on :-P

But your point is noted--  that's why I'm setting up a test bed now, with
a debug kernel so I can find the bad code and fix it myself.  Instead of
using my time to complain, I'll try to spend what little I have to diagnose
the problem(s).  I'm still a little upset with the vinum to gvinum breakage
but I can't imagine life without gvinum.

-- Rick C. Petty