large RAID volume partition strategy

[Thomas Hurst]

* Vivek Khera (vivek at khera.org) wrote:

> I'll investigate this option.  Does anyone know the stability
> reliability of the mpt(4) driver on CURRENT?  Is it out of GIANT lock
> yet?  It was hard to tell from the TODO list if it is entirely free of
> GIANT or not.

Yes, mpt(4) was made MPSAFE in revision 1.41, about 3 months ago:

  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/mpt/mpt.c#rev1.41

I've not seen any stability issues with mpt in either of our test
systems, running heavy MySQL load over >20 spindles and a couple of
controllers each.

> My only fear of this is that once this system is in production, that's
> pretty much it.  Maintenance windows are about 1 year apart, usually
> longer.

Best temper your fear with some thorough testing then.  If you are going
to use ZFS in such a situation, though, I might be strongly tempted to
use Solaris instead.

Why the long gaps between maintenance?

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/