FreeBSD 8.0-BETA4 IBM ServerRaid 8k issues

Ivan Voras ivoras at freebsd.org
Thu Sep 10 18:39:51 UTC 2009


2009/9/10 George Mamalakis <mamalos at eng.auth.gr>:

> Thank you for your answer again, and (now that you mentioned it:) ) in case
> anyone knows whether we'll be able to see partitions > 2T in the future (or
> now?!), please say how :).

Actually, FreeBSD can use arbitrary sized drives and partitions
(64-bit) but it's only the default partition scheme (bsdlabel) that
doesn't support it. Since bsdlabel is used by the default installer
(sysinstall), it means you can't install FreeBSD on such a setup,
which is recognized to be a Bad Thing. The solution is to use a modern
partitioning scheme like GPT (which has 64-bit limits) and then:

a) partition the drive/array from a Live CD and do a manual install of
FreeBSD from the installer CDs - which isn't as hard as it sounds,
since it involves basically two steps: installing the boot loaders and
unpacking the files or

b) install on a smaller drive (or volume if your controller supports
creating arbitrary volumes / partitions on top of RAID topology) and
use this drive/volume for the OS, and then partition and use the
larger array/volume for data.

In either case, once you manually partition the drive/volume with GPT,
you will encounter no further size limits.

A really kludgy workaround, which I don't think you should use, is to
create two partitions (I don't know if you could create more than two
2 TB partitions)  and then use gconcat to concatenate them into a
bigger "JBOD-style" software RAID device.


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