What is the status of gvinum in FreeBSD 5.3?

[Loren M. Lang]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 04:57:33PM -0500, Bill Moran wrote:
> 
> I was wondering about the status of gvinum in 5.3.
> 
> I seem to remember that there were a lot of problems with gvinum in 5.3,
> but searching around, I can't seem to find anything that says for sure
> one way or the other.
> 
> I'm just trying to seperate the FUD from the reality.  Is there anywhere
> that has the status?  Anyone using gvinum that can say how reliable it
> is or isn't?
> 
> I understand that there are GEOM classes available that have some of
> the functionality of vinum that I could use instead, but there are
> two reasons that these aren't an option for me.
> 1) I'm wanting to migrate 4.X machines with existing vinum volumes to
>    5, and I'd rather not dump/restore.

FreeBSD 5.x also has the original vinum implementation plus gvinum
so it should be possible to use that instead of needing to dump/restore.
Though I think that there are a couple of limitations like no swap on
the original vinum do to the addition of GEOM.

> 2) There is at least one feature that vinum has that I don't see in
>    any GEOM class, that I'm using.  That is the ability to add subdisks
>    and use growfs to enlarge filesystems without having to dump/restore.

I think that either geom_ccd or geom_concat will allow you to concat
more drives in and then use growfs to expand the fs.

> 
> -- 
> Bill Moran
> Potential Technologies
> http://www.potentialtech.com



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