vinum requirements

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 23 April 2004 at 14:47:30 -0400, synrat wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, 22 April 2004 at 11:32:22 -0400, synrat wrote:
>>>
>>> does vinum configuration need to be located
>>> in the beginning of the drive after bootstrap or
>>> is it possible to store at the end of the drive ?
>>
>> Currently it must be at the beginning of a drive.
>>
>>> the reason I ask is I only have 60kb available in the beginining and
>>> the first partition is /.  I should be able to shrink swap, which is
>>> at the end of the drive, but I'm not sure I understand how vinum
>>> stores it's configuration. Does there need to be a separate
>>> partition for vinum that has at least enough space for
>>> configuration, which doesn't overlap with anything else ?
>>
>> No, it's part of the drive.  In Vinum terminology, a "drive" is a disk
>> partition, the same one on which the subdisks are stored.
>>
>>> Is the rest of vinum partition supposed to overlap with everything
>>> that I want to configure as a plex ( I'm talking about mirroring
>>> exisiting partitions ) Or should there be 2 different vinum
>>> partitions, one for configuration and another one for plexes ?
>>
>> I'd suggest you take a look at the documentation at
>> http://www.vinumvm.org/cfbsd/vinum.pdf.  It should clarify a number of
>> things.
>>
>> And yes, in retrospect it was a bad idea to put the configuration at
>> the front of the drive.
>
> Does all this mean that if I don't have ~133kb available
> for Vinum in the beginning of the disk before my first ( root )
> partition, I can't use Vinum on that disk ?

Well, you would have to rearrange things.

> or would it write half of the configuration in that first 60kb and
> the rest in whatever other freespace I have ?

No, it would write half the configuration in the first 66.5 kB and the
rest of the configuration directly behind it, overwriting important
things like the first two superblocks.

> I admit this sounds like a joke :).

It sounds more like a recipe for disaster to me.

Greg
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