Hey all, Lately I've been using VMware to delve into the murky waters of creating and maintaining RAID arrays, and I thought I'd get a bit adventurous. I compiled the kernel with the following config file:
# cat /usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/GENERIC.RAID include "arch/i386/conf/GENERIC" pseudo-device raid 8 option RAID_AUTOCONFIG # The commented out default in the GENERIC file says 4 - I figured if I changed it to 8, I could get more RAIDs in there for a rather large nested RAID setup. My aim was for a RAID 1 array with 4 RAID 0 arrays of 4 10gb "disks" each within. So I set up the first 4 arrays which went without incident, but when I went to create the RAID 1, it said that raid4 didn't exist. I ran MAKEDEV to attempt to create another 4 sets (to complete the 8) to no avail. So I created the last set of RAID device files, and went on to create the array. This went without incident until I went to initialise the array. At this point the kernel panicked. As I didn't get the panic message the first time, I attempted to recreate the error, and here's what I did, along with a summary of my "system": The VM has 16 10gb SCSI disks. Each one would have the system on it should any of the disks "fail" and a reboot be needed at the same time. The RAID arrays are configured thus: # cat /etc/raid0_1.conf START array #One column, 4 drives per column, no spares 1 4 0 START disks # A list of the drives to use /dev/sd4d /dev/sd5d /dev/sd6d /dev/sd7d START layout # 128 bytes per stripe, 1 stripe per parity unit, 1 stripe per # reconstruction unit, in raid 0 128 1 1 0 START queue # This establishes a FIFO queue of 100 requests fifo 100 # cat /etc/raid0_2.conf START array #One column, 4 drives per column, no spares 1 4 0 START disks # A list of the drives to use /dev/sd8d /dev/sd9d /dev/sd10d /dev/sd11d START layout # 128 bytes per stripe, 1 stripe per parity unit, 1 stripe per # reconstruction unit, in raid 0 128 1 1 0 START queue # This establishes a FIFO queue of 100 requests fifo 100 # cat /etc/raid0_3.conf START array #One column, 4 drives per column, no spares 1 4 0 START disks # A list of the drives to use /dev/sd12d /dev/sd13d /dev/sd14d /dev/sd15d START layout # 128 bytes per stripe, 1 stripe per parity unit, 1 stripe per # reconstruction unit, in raid 0 128 1 1 0 START queue # This establishes a FIFO queue of 100 requests fifo 100 # I would then clone the first disk's table: # disklabel sd0 > disklabel.tpl # for i in 1 2 3; do echo y | fdisk -i sd$i; disklabel -R sd$i disklabel.tpl; done (whole heap of crap) I would then create a RAID partition inside each RAID device, then I would initialise the RAID 1, configured as: # cat /etc/raid1.conf START array #One column, 4 drives per column, no spares 1 4 0 START disks # A list of the drives to use /dev/raid0d /dev/raid1d /dev/raid2d /dev/raid3d START layout # 128 bytes per stripe, 1 stripe per parity unit, 1 stripe per # reconstruction unit, in raid 1 128 1 1 1 START queue # This establishes a FIFO queue of 100 requests fifo 100 # Then I would initialise the RAID array: # raidctl -C /etc/raid1.conf raid4 # raidctl -I 100 raid4 # raidctl -iv raid4 At this point, all hell broke loose, but not this time. Unfortunately I didn't get the error message the first time, but after I set it up to auto configure and take place as root, I rebooted, only to find that while the first 4 raid archives appeared, the root one did not - in fact the first 4's parity statuses were "DIRTY". As such it booted from the first hard drive as it did before. I'll be trying this again in a fresh install of OpenBSD to try and catch the error message. In the meantime if anybody can shed some light on why what I've done hasn't worked, I would really appreciate it. Regards, and sorry for the TL;DR. -- Aaron Mason AKA Absorbent Shoulder Man <i>Oh, why does everything I whip leave me?</i>
