vinum to gvinum help

[Tim Bishop]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 12:22:07PM -0400, Sven Willenberger wrote:
> I have an i386 system currently running 5.2.1-RELEASE with a vinum
> mirror array (2 drives comprising /usr ). I want to upgrade this to
> 5.5-RELEASE which, if I understand correctly, no longer supports vinum
> arrays. Would simply chaning /boot/loader.conf to read gvinum_load
> instead of vinum_load work or would the geom layer prevent this from
> working properly? If not, is there a recommended way of upgrading a
> vinum array to a gvinum or gmirror array?

I did this upgrade not long ago (and later to 6.1). The process of
switching from vinum to gvinum is pretty easy, although the specifics
escape me now. Changing loader.conf and fstab are the main ones, but
assuming you have console access you should easily be able to fix
anything else that crops up.

As Mark said, there were shared library version changes between these
versions, so you'll end up needing to rebuild all your apps. I did this
with portupgrade, but I got everything updated and working on 5.2.1
first so I wouldn't have to worry about that during the upgrade.

A word of warning though. I'm currently left with no raid because
somewhere along the line vinum/gvinum corrupted the metadata. This
only happened after a disk failure and after switching to gvinum
(could be coincidence), but has left me looking elsewhere - gmirror
looks good - for a RAID system. See the archives of this list for
details - summary is that the kernel module locks up when loading.

Tim.

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Tim Bishop
http://www.bishnet.net/tim/
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