Issues with gjournal (heaaaaaaaaaaalp!)

[Garrett Cooper]

Hi Pawel, ATA, and Stable folks,

    This time when I did a reinstall I took the bullet and tried to
use gjournaling instead of softupdates. The unfortunate thing is that
I can't seem to get it to work.

Here's the procedure that I'm trying to follow (based off of [1]):
- sysinstall from scratch with a minimal distribution. This creates
/usr // /dev/ad6s1d as UFS2 with softupdates disabled.
- Pull latest stable sources. Rebuild kernel (with `options
GEOM_JOURNAL'), world, install kernel, then world after reboot.
- gjournal label -f ad6s1d ad6s2d
- mount /dev/ad6s1d /usr # That works (I think...), but prints out the
error message below:

GEOM_JOURNAL: [flush] Error while writing data (error=1)
ad6s2d[WRITE(offset=512, length=6656)]

gjournal status says:
            Name   Status   Components
ad6s1d.journal       N/A   ad6s1d
                                     ad6s2d

Some issues I noticed:

- GJOURNAL ROOT (something) loops infinitely if the device can't be
found; this should probably time out and panic / exit if a device
becomes unavailable (depends on fstab values in the final 2 fields no
doubt). I did this by accident when I forgot to add iir statically to
the kernel.
- The LiveCD doesn't fully support gjournal (userland's there, kernel
support isn't). Kind of annoying and counterproductive...
- Existing journal partitions disappeared when I upgraded by accident
from 7.2-RELEASE to 8-CURRENT (silly me copied my srcs.sup file from
my server with label=.). That was weird...
- When I use gjournal label with an existing filesystem I _must_ use -f.

Any help with this endeavor would be more than appreciated, as I want
to enable this functionality before I move on to installing X11, as
nvidia-driver frequently hardlocks the desktop (or has in the past).

Thanks,
-Garrett

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/gjournal-desktop/article.html