raid framework from OpenBSD

[Joao Barros]

On 9/14/05, Scott Long <scottl at samsco.org> wrote:
> Massimo wrote:
> > I would like to know what do you think about new OpenBSD raid framework
> > management.
> > http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=112630095818062
> >
> > Doesn't it seems good stuff which is good for consideration?
> >
> > Regards.
> 
> Creating a unified management tool for multiple RAID architectures has
> been a Holy Grail for at least 10 years, if not longer.  It's
> deceptively hard, though.  While it sounds straight-forward and is
> relatively easy to do for 1 or 2 architectures, the vast differences in
> how different architectures work makes it quickly turn into a huge mess.
> This is especially true when it comes to topology discovery and
> management and asynchronous event notification.  Often times the only
> course is to degrade to a very simple, lowest common denominator
> interface, which then starts to limit the usefulness of the tool.  I've
> been involved in several professional projects in exactly this area, and
> it simply is very, very hard to do well. The OpenBSD work looks
> interesting, but unless they can demostrate useful operation on more
> than 1 or 2 architectures, it's not terribly impressive.  That's not to
> say that it can't be done and be a success, but the amount of required
> effort should not be underestimated. It's relatively easy to come up
> with a framework and implement one architecture module in it, then tell
> everyone else to simply add more modules.
> 
> Also, it's not clear from the email whether the tool has to be manually
> told to rescan and look for changes in the state of the array (not just
> SES/SAFTE changes of the component drives).  Displaying status on demand
> is fine, but what admin sits in front of their terminal and refreshes
> their monitoring apps every 5 seconds?  The key is to have a an event
> notification pipeline that can collect events in near real time, filter
> them in a configurable way, and send out email/pager alerts when
> appropriate.  Also, what does this mean for a datacenter full of
> machines that need to be monitored?  Does a remote terminal session need
> to be opened on each one in order for monitoring to work?
> 
> But, even if this particular work degrades into only being a tool for
> AMI (I assume they mean MegaRAID) controllers, it's still useful and I
> give them credit for doing it.

Having an amr I'm most interested in this, as I guess more people are.
Given that there is "customer" interest, my question is: is there
interest from you in this, having it imported to FreeBSD?
I've looked at the code and I wouldn't mind starting to work on this.

--
Joao Barros