Newbie gmirror questions

[Matthew Seaman]

Mike Clarke wrote:
> On Sunday 17 January 2010, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> 
>> Mike Clarke wrote:
>>> Actually I was more concerned about what happens when I boot into
>>> another OS like Windows or Linux on one of the spare slices - I'm
>>> assuming that I have to apply gmirror to the whole disk rather than
>>> just selected slices?
>> You can't do this.  gmirror is FreeBSD specific, and other OSes can't
>> deal with it.  You can take your two drives, partition them (fdisk)
>> and then create a gmirror across the slices you assign to FreeBSD.
> 
> This will make things a lot easier for me. I think all the examples of 
> gmirror I've seen used things like /dev/da0 as the provider in label 
> commands so I assumed that I had to use the whole physical disk but if 
> I can mirror individual slices then I have much more flexibility.
> 
> My motherboard has a UDMA133 controller for ata0 & ata1 (which I don't 
> use) and 2 SATA controllers for ata2 to ata5 so with my 2 SATA drives 
> spread between the controllers on channels 2 & 4 I could have something 
> like /dev/mirror/gm1 provided by /dev/ad2s1 & /dev/ad4s1 
> and /dev/mirror/gm2 provided by /dev/ad2s2 & /dev/ad4s2 for a couple of 
> FreeBSD systems. That will leave me with 2 spare slices on each drive 
> for other purposes. Any Windows or Linux stuff I put on tends to be 
> mainly experimental and less long term than my FreeBSD system so don't 
> really need the resilience of being mirrored.
> 

Yes -- there's an On-Lamp article by Dru Lavigne that has been particularly
influential, and gmirror'ing whole disks is the best way forwards for the
vast majority of cases where you've a server dedicated to one OS.

However, one of the really amazingly brilliant things about geom is that
just about any disk / storage related thing can be a geom provider, and 
geom constructs will nest very happily.  Here's a howto for setting up
gmirror across a pair of slices:

http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/

It's fairly old now, but the essentials are still correct.  The one thing
that has changed in the intervening time is what is the best algorithm
to use for the gmirror.  Up until the release of 8.0, 'round-robin' was 
virtually always the right choice, but nowadays 'load' is preferred.
All that means, is change the following line in rse's article from:

gmirror label -v -n -b round-robin ${gm} /dev/${d2}s1

to

gmirror label -v -n -b load ${gm} /dev/${d2}s1


	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
                                                  Kent, CT11 9PW

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