gvinum + geli + gjournal

[Anthony Chavez]

On 11/21/2011 02:43 AM, Anthony Chavez wrote:
> # newfs -b 65536 -f 8192 -U /dev/gvinum/external
> newfs: wtfs: 512 bytes at sector 11721065471: Invalid argument
> # newfs -U /dev/gvinum/external
> newfs: wtfs: 512 bytes at sector 11721065471: Invalid argument
> # newfs /dev/gvinum/external
> newfs: wtfs: 512 bytes at sector 11721065471: Invalid argument

After posting, I used diskinfo on the gvinum object, which reported a
512b sectorsize, so I'm thinking this was the issue I was facing.
There's also this, which has me thinking gvinum doesn't support 4k
sectors yet:

% grep -n sectorsize ~metis/sys/geom/vinum/geom_vinum_subr.c
1068:                   pp->sectorsize = 512;    /* XXX */

Anyhow, the last time I had to prepare a large, diverse pool of storage
was during the 5.x branch, so I was trying to work with what I was
familiar with (vinum).  And due to budget constraints, I'm stuck using
i386 32-bit for the time being, so ZFS wasn't really an option.

After some research, I've got a much better understanding of how the
GEOM components fit together, and I must say that I'm quite pleased with
what I've found!

I have since decided to give sysutils/graid5 a spin, and so far it's
doing exactly what I had hoped to accomplish with vinum (including using
regular disk partitions as subdisks, which I intended to get to eventually).

I have 2 questions regarding graid5:

1. Why hasn't it made its way to the base FreeBSD distribution yet?
2. Has anyone done any rigorous testing with it?

-- 
Anthony Chavez                                  http://hexadecagram.org/
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