State of gvinum RAID-5

[Jorn Argelo]

Michael L. Squires wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Felix 'buebo' Kakrow wrote:
>
>> Hello List,
>> I tried gvinum RAID-5 with a 5-Stable around the time when 5.1 or 5.2
>> was released (afair) and back then it basically sucked big time. Raid
>> worked as long as nothing failed, but reconstructing a drive was
>> somewhere between very painful and not possible.
>>
>> Now I will have to upgrade hardware soon, which means I could switch
>> from NetBSD (and Raidframe) to FreeBSD (with gvinum) again. I would
>> like to because NetBSD seems to have some kind of memory leak in
>> connection with Samba and large or many files, but I'd rather have a
>> somewhat unstable Samba than an unstable Raid, so what's the state of
>> affairs?
>>
>> Cheers
>> Felix
>
> I'm about to try; I have my home server stuck at 4.11 because I could 
> never get gvinum to work reliably with 5.x, and the drives I had wouldn't
> work with two different hardware RAID controllers (ex EMC ST446xxx's,
> a DPT/Adaptec controller and a LSI controller - apparently only certain
> EMC BIOS versions will work, and I don't have them).
>
> I did find a posting by someone who installed gvinum/RAID5 recently 
> (under
> 6.X) but there was nothing about stability.
>
> Mike Squires
> UNIX(tm) at home
> since 1986
>
I'm running gvinum on a PowerEdge 2450 with an external Adaptec SCSI 
card connected to a PowerVault 712 (I think, at least an old one), also 
running RAID 5. This runs on FreeBSD 6.1. It was not that hard to set it 
up, as the handbook has well written documentation about it. However, 
there is one thing you should know: Never, ever, edit the gvinum config 
file directly when you want to remove drives from your array. Use the 
gvinum shell for that. Immediately removing them from the config file 
will cause kernel panics. In fact, only use the config file to define 
your array: Make changes via the shell. Maybe it sounds logic to you, 
but I had about 10 kernel panics before I figured that out.

Overall if you follow exactly what's being said in the documentation it 
is quite okay, but my gvinum installation is still missing features. The 
Google Summer of Code project has invested quite a lot of time in fixing 
the missing features in gvinum, so overall I think it should be a fairly 
complete suite now. I'm not sure if those changes are already commited 
to the source tree, but I guess they are.

My gvinum installation certainly is stable, however. And the server is 
fairly important, so I can't risk upgrading gvinum and maybe ruin the array.

Jorn
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