Nesting gvinum?

[Jonathan Dobbie]

Greetings list (hopefully the correct one).  I'm installing my first
FreeBSD server in two versions (I think 4.10 was the last one) and I've
gotten myself a bit confused by geom.  The box is an 850MHz PE Dell with
3 36GB u320 drives, but no RAID card, that will be a syslog server.

I was hoping to have something like md+LVM where I could change the size
of RAID 5 volumes.  Could I have a large gvinum raid-5 volume and then
make 3 gvinum volumes on top that could be resized?

Also, is there a better fs to use on top of gvinum?  Unlinks and file
creation "feel" slow to me.  I thought about reiser, but my coworker was
burned the last time he put it on a production box and we've been rather
cautious since.  Didn't UFS2 come out for freeBSD a while ago?  I'm
using the generic kernel right now, as I just installed the box
yesterday, so hopefully that will help a bit, but I'm not expecting it
to do much for disk access.

I know that shelling out the 250$ for a raid card is the best option,
but no one with a budget wants to put any money into the box.

It's nice to be back working on FreeBSD again.  I've been doing 90% OSX
and 10% Linux for the past few years, and it is wonderful to be on an OS
that is designed as opposed to grown.  There are too many things on
linux that are just "weird" that people deal without questioning.  And
OSX... I like OSX, it is a wonderful desktop OS.  It's innards make me
want to cry.

Thanks in advance for the help, relevant config files below:

Here is what I set up:
/etc/fstab:
/dev/mirror/swap        none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/mirror/root        /               ufs     rw              1       1
/dev/gvinum/logs        /var/log        ufs     rw              1       1
/dev/gvinum/var         /var            ufs     rw              1       1
/dev/gvinum/usr         /usr            ufs     rw              1       1

The mirrors are on s1:
  a:   508352  2560000    4.2BSD        0     0     0
  b:  2560000        0      swap                   
  c:  3068352        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part,
don't edit

and the gvinum is RAID 5 on s2
# /dev/da1s2:
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  a: 68051340  3068415     vinum                   
  c: 68051340  3068415    unused        0     0         # "raw" part,
don't edit
partition a: partition extends past end of unit
partition c: partition extends past end of unit
bsdlabel: partition c doesn't start at 0!
bsdlabel: An incorrect partition c may cause problems for standard
system utilities

my config file is:
drive Left device /dev/da0s2a
drive Center device /dev/da1s2a
drive Right device /dev/da2s2a

volume logs
  plex org raid5 256k
    sd length 10G drive Left
    sd length 10G drive Center
    sd length 10G drive Right

volume var
  plex org raid5 256k
    sd length 50M drive Left
    sd length 50M drive Center
    sd length 50M drive Right

volume usr
  plex org raid5 256k
    sd length 0 drive Left
    sd length 0 drive Center
    sd length 0 drive Right