newbie to hw raid and lvm

[Stephan van Beerschoten]

Stephan van Beerschoten wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I jus this morning installed a new copy of -current onto a desktop 
> platform with a raidcontroller on its motherboard.
> It is a promise controller and it works.
>
> However, I wonder now if there is such a thing as a LVM for FreeBSD ?
> Vinum, I noticed, cannot help me with this, but having a blob of 160GB 
> (2x 160gb mirrored) would be a lot more helpfull if I could put 
> so-called softpartitions on top of it. Much like what I'm used to on 
> the Solaris platform that allows me on-the-fly creations and resizes 
> of volumes.
>
> Also, I noticed the kernel recognized each individual disk which is 
> part of my mirror. Is it possible to do anything with the raid 
> configuration from a userland perspective or is this information given 
> only because the kernel happends to be able to register it, but one 
> cannot actually DO anything with this information ?


I forgot to include one other thing I wondered about. After I installed 
the base OS, I wanted to 'test' the mirror so I unplugged the power to 
one of the disks. The result was FreeBSD panicing, which was not what I 
expected to see. This was still with 5.2.1 (I'm now up to par with 
-CURRENT).
I would assume the system would continue utilizing the one existend 
disk, specially after FreeBSD _knows_ the configuration of the raid array.

Any comments for this disillusioned raid newbie ?

/Stephan