Announcing: gvirstor

[Yoshihiro Ota]

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:01:23 +0200
Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> wrote:

>   Ota wrote:
> 
> 
> > # ./gvirstor label -v -s 500 test md2 md3
> > Unknown command: label
> 
> This means the .so file has not been found.
> 
> I see now what's going on: I've forgot to add a step to the README: make 
> a symlink of geom_virstor.so in your /lib/geom directory:
> 
> /lib/geom# ln -s /path_to_gvirstor/geom_virstor.so

Indeed, this was the problem, and now:
# ./gvirstor label -v -s 5000 test md2 /dev/md3
Resizing virtual size to fit virstor structures
New virtual size: 5120 MB (30 new chunks)
Total virtual chunks: 1280 (4 MB each), 5120 MB total virtual size.
Clearing metadata on md2 /dev/md3.
Writing allocation table to md2... (0 MB, 1 chunks) 
Storing metadata on md2 (250 chunks)  /dev/md3 (250 chunks)  Done.
# newfs -U /dev/virstor/test
/dev/virstor/test: 5120.0MB (10485760 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
        using 28 cylinder groups of 183.77MB, 11761 blks, 23552 inodes.
        with soft updates
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 160, 376512, 752864, 1129216, 1505568, 1881920, 2258272, 2634624, 3010976,
 3387328, 3763680, 4140032, 4516384, 4892736, 5269088, 5645440, 6021792,
 6398144, 6774496, 7150848, 7527200, 7903552, 8279904, 8656256, 9032608,
 9408960, 9785312, 10161664

> Also, take care to remove CFLAGS line from Makefile if you don't have a 
> kernel with INVARIANTS and WITNESS.

"-g" option was required in "CFLAGS"; otherwise, kldload failed.

> I hope to hear about your experience with it.

Reading "gvirstor implementation details", it is not intended to remove components, is it?  If not, it will a grate benefit to allow "take-off" components as some device may go bad while other devices are still functioning when a virstor is created with multiple devices.

I tried it anyway.  It seemed that I was able to detach md3 and then add md4.  Md3 was not used at all when I removed; status only displaed md2 but I was not sure if it was removed perfectly in gvirstor as no mention in the document.  Later, I was not able to add md3 back again.

These are the command lines I tried
# mount /dev/virstor/test /mnt/tmp
# tar xf ports.tar.bz -C /mnt/tmp &
# ./gvirstor remove test md3
# ./gvirstor add test md4
# ./gvirstor status test
# ./gvirstor add test md3

Kernel paniced after a while. Many things were going so it was not sure that gvirstor was the cause of the problem.

I will try as time permitts.

Thanks,
Hiro