Recommended gmirror solution with swap?

Thomas Hurst tom.hurst at clara.net
Mon Jan 1 22:08:27 UTC 2007


* Michael Knoll (michael.knoll at gmail.com) wrote:

> I am planning on converting my FreeBSD machine to use gmirror on two
> 40gig drives.  Reading the handbook and other sites with instructions
> on configuring gmirror, I notice they all disable swap.  Is this
> acceptable?  Is it expected swap be on another drive?  If so, is there
> a solution which I can keep the swap on the mirror. as I don't have
> another drive?

On every gmirrorred system I've set up I've always included swap in the
mirror; you don't have to, but it's a good idea if you want the system
to stay up after a disk failure, which is surely part of if not the
entire point.

You can't put kernel crash dumps on gmirrored devices, but you can
put them on one of the underlying providers fairly easily if that's
important.

Are you sure you're not confusing the swapoff="YES" line many guides
suggest adding to rc.conf with disabling swap completely?  This just
makes the system issue swapoff -a at shutdown to make sure any mirrored
swap devices are closed, which used to result in the mirror being
rebuilt at startup because it was "dirty".

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/


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