5.0 Raidframe / SMP / Questions

[Michael G. Jung]

First I'm new to raidframe... but I have a few questions/problems - thanks to all
in advance...

--mikej
Michael Jung

The scenario - I have 20xFastWide 18.2 disks - would like to mirror two for boot 
2 hot spare and use 16 raid 5(4?).... I'm looking for drive space and not necessarily 
raw speed.

I'm testing with: 

FreeBSD dual-450.mikej.com 5.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Jan 16 22:16:53 GMT 2003     root at hollin.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

0) I've been reading the netbsd list and it seems problems exist with smp... is that 
   the case with FreeBSD ????

1) "man raidcontrol" indicates that you need to set the disklabel to "RAID" if you want
    the kernel to boot from the partition but disklabel stubbornly insists that "RAID" is not a valid
    type...  I get this error when trying to do so with disklabel......

   "line 23: Warning, unknown file system type RAID"

   and it kindly marks the partion type to "unknown"

2) Does RAID 4 work?????  for write performance would this not be a better option?

3)  I have two drives in the chain that I get "unknown IOCTL" when they are in my raid
    config... yet they are labeled exactly like the rest.....  this is when running raidctl -C myconfigfile
   (yeah  da3s1e and da9s1e are the culprits)


Here is the config file (note they are commented out.. and the drive count is 8 active drives)

START array
# numRow numCol numSpare
1 8 0

START disks
/dev/da0s1e
/dev/da1s1e
/dev/da2s1e
#/dev/da3s1e
/dev/da4s1e
/dev/da5s1e
/dev/da6s1e
/dev/da7s1e
/dev/da8s1e

START spare
#/dev/da9s1e

START layout
# sectPerSU SUsPerParityUnit SUsPerReconUnit RAID_level_5
32 1 1 5

START queue
fifo 100

++++++++++++++++++++
Here is a sample disklabel of a drive that complains about IOCTL
++++++++++++++++++++

# /dev/da3s1c:
type: SCSI
disk: da3s1
label: 
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 255
sectors/cylinder: 16065
cylinders: 2213
sectors/unit: 35566480
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
drivedata: 0 

8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  c: 35566480        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 2213*)
  e: 35551782        0    4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl.    0 - 2212*)
(root at dual-450) /etc# 


++++++++++++++++++++++
Here is a drive that works in my config file
++++++++++++++++++++++

(root at dual-450) /etc# disklabel da1s1
# /dev/da1s1c:
type: SCSI
disk: da1s1
label: 
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 255
sectors/cylinder: 16065
cylinders: 2213
sectors/unit: 35566480
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
drivedata: 0 

8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  c: 35566480        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 2213*)
  e: 35551782        0    4.2BSD        0     0     0   # (Cyl.    0 - 2212*)
(root at dual-450) /etc# 


NOTE:  da0 has the lowest sector count of 35551782... so I've set all e: slices to this value