gnome, automounting, and ataraid don't get along well

[John Hood]

I upgraded my desktop machine to 8.0-RC2 and 8.0-RELEASE packages 
recently.  This machine uses an Intel chipset, ICH9R southbridge, and 
two SATA drives configured in a RAID1 with Intel's soft-RAID BIOS.  ad10 
and ad12 are automatically configured into an array by ataraid that 
shows up as ar0, which has FreeBSD installed in a typical UFS 
multi-partition setup.  I'm using the GNOME desktop.

At first glance, all appears to be happy.  But when I run a software 
build that creates/mounts filesystem images with the md driver, I get an 
authentication dialog, photo attached, which wants to mount something 
but doesn't say what.  If I authenticate, gnome then proceeds to mount 
multiple devices in /dev/ufsid and/or partitions of ad12s1, ignoring the 
fact that that they're part of a RAID that's already mounted.  (It 
seemed to ignore the md device, though.)  I get this in syslog, 
suggesting that kernel & mount are unaware of the duplicate mounts:

Oct 27 17:54:40 lister kernel: WARNING: /site was not properly dismounted
Oct 27 17:54:40 lister kernel: /site: mount pending error: blocks 32 files 2

This obviously has big potential for filesystem corruption on any 
FreeBSD 8.0 system using GNOME and ataraid.  Fortunately, I seem not to 
have lost any data.  This also happens when attaching/detaching a USB drive.

I didn't see any of this with FreeBSD 7.1, probably because automounting 
was broken or disabled there.

I see several problems here.

1) the GNOME authentication dialog gives you no clue what it's trying to 
mount (when I saw it, I guessed it was GNOME's automounting wanting to 
play with the md device), and no clue that its caller will apply the 
authorization on six other mounts it has pending.

2) the devices in /dev/ufsid/ are associated with partitions on the adN 
drives, not for the RAID they're assembled into (not sure whether ata or 
ataraid or geom/glabel is responsible for this).  I only see devices for 
one of the drives, but I think this is because the mirrored filesystems 
have the same UFS IDs on each drive and duplicates get 
disallowed/not-handled somewhere.

3) adN devices that are in an ATA raid are still visible and mountable.

4) GNOME isn't aware of any of this (should it be, or should the issue 
be handled in devfs & GEOM?)

5) There doesn't seem to be any tool to check or repair an ataraid mirror.

For the moment, I've got the authentication disabled so the problem 
doesn't arise.  If anyone wants to look at this, I'll be happy to help, 
otherwise I'll look at ataraid when I get a chance.

   --jh