Newbie gmirror questions

[Pieter de Goeje]

On Saturday 16 January 2010 00:34:52 Mike Clarke wrote:
> I'm about to upgrade to more disk space and I'm tempted use this as an
> opportunity to get two disks and implement gmirror. Before I go ahead
> there's a few aspects of mirroring I'm not sure about and would
> appreciate some advice.
>
> I'm using grub for multi booting. Does this introduce any problems if I
> want to boot into Windows or Linux on one of the other partitions?

Gmirror stores the metadata at the last sector of each disk. So this shouldn't 
be a problem. But other operating systems might overwrite this data if you're 
not careful during the paritioning.

>
> The gmirror manpage describes the procedure for handling kernel dumps
> using the prefer balance algorithm in the early stages of booting and
> then switching to round-robin in the /etc/rc.local script. It then goes
> on to say that "If on the next boot a component with a higher priority
> will be available, the prefer algorithm will choose to read from it and
> savecore(8) will find nothing". Does this only arise if I've made some
> change to the configuration of the mirror between the dump and the
> reboot or is there some instances when the priority automatically
> changes?

Priority never changes automatically.

>
> Some of the articles I've read about gmirror suggest setting the balance
> to round-robin while others just leave this at the default setting of
> split. Am I right in assuming that round-robin would give better
> performance, and does it make much noticeable difference in real terms.
> In particular am I likely to see a reduction in performance using
> gmirror compared with what I would get with just a normal single disk.

Assuming you have two or more regular HDDs, I can recommend updating to 
8-STABLE and using the "load" algorithm. It has had some major improvements 
lately, and is now the default. It should give equal or better read 
performance in comparison to a single disk in all cases. The performance 
of "split" and "round-robin" is very dependent on the access patterns and 
stripe size (for split).

>
> Finally, recent articles say to set kern.geom.debugflags to 17 when
> creating a mirror on a mounted drive while older articles say to set it
> to 16. Although I'll probably be creating the mirror on my disks before
> copying my system onto them so I don't really need to worry about
> setting this flag but I'm curious to know the difference between using
> the two values.

The sysctl is a bitfield, so 17 (0x11) enables some extra stuff compared to 16 
(0x10). See geom(4), section DIAGNOSTICS for more details.

-- 
Pieter de Goeje