gvinum behaviour on disk failure

[Alastair Watts]

R. B. Riddick wrote:

> Yes. Out of my theoretically modell, I have of FBSD in my brain there are at
> least 2 possibilities:
> 
> 1. use a partition/slice of the larger disk (bsdlabel... or fdisk...)

Will gmirror work with slices? I thought it worked on the physical drive 
layer..

> and
> 2. just use gmirror and hope that it build the minimum of both sizes (which it
> does actually I think; so u do not have to hope very much...)...

Haven't tried that, but have wondered if it will work. I guess you would 
have to use the smaller of the drives as the initial drive to base the 
mirror on.

>>Yes... I noticed gvinum was very different to Greg's original vinum 
>>suite ;) But this seems to be a fundamental thing that's missing from 
>>gvinum - the ability to recover from a drive failure and to be able to 
>>service the request from a different plex.
> 
> Hmm... Does gmirror overcome these drawbacks?

Don't know. If it doesn't then it's still a problem in my opinion :) We 
have more machines using gmirror than gvinum (only 1 with gvinum), but 
so far only the machine with gvinum has had a drive fail since FBSD 5.3 
upwards.

I'd still like to hear from someone who knows the insides of gvinum as 
to their opinion on the earlier reported incident.

Cheers,

Al