Hello! I've recently started playing around with the softraid(4) driver, as I recently noticed that bsd.rd already comes with support for it. What I want to accomplish is to place as much as possible into the RAID set (RAID 1, of course), ideally (almost) booting from it.
Up until now I have used ccd(4). Since it isn't possible to create ccd-containers at install, I've always made disklabel with some space for the root mount, then one big slice for "the rest", and as soon as the base install was done bring up the ccd-container, set up the "real" disklabel there, and move /usr, /var, etc. there, relying on daily(8) to keep my / mirrored in /altroot. Now I'm wondering if this whole process could be simplified precisely with softraid. I've already been able to construct a mirror set at install. My first naive try was to make a sort of pseudo-disklabel on the "real" disks, so that the 'a' slice just spans the entire disk, typed "RAID". Then I instructed bioctl to build a RAID 1-set out of those two slices. Reboot, bsd.rd still finds it, and now install into the new sd0. Of course, this didn't work and fails first thing at boot giving "ERR M". Reading up about the boot process, I'm now quite sure that it coulnd't possibly work this way ever since /boot has no way of knowing about the softraid-container until the kernel is loaded, which precisely would be /boot's function. What I now tried was allocating just a very tiny "boot" slice (just enough space for boot and the kernel), and having installboot(8) instructed to use *this* bootloader (outside of the RAID-set) to boot. I now get the kernel to load without problem, just as expected, and the kernel also finds the RAID-set at sd0 as bsd.rd did, so in theory it could just go on and boot from there. But instead, it tries to use this "boot-slice" (wd0a) as it's root device, which of course must fail (and does so, quite spectacularily). The boot(8) manpage gives the hint of using '-a' to be able to specify which drive the kernel should use as it's root drive. This way, I *am* able to successfully boot into my newly installed system. So this looks like my idea could at least theoretically work. However, I have not yet found any way of somehow storing this device somewhere so that I *don't* have to physically sit there and type in 'sd0' whenever I just happen to be wanting to boot. Now, what I want to ask: Is there a way to somehow "force" the root device of my choice into the kernel, e.g. ` la config(8)? Or is there maybe a way of specifying it into a boot.conf-stub placed into my "boot-slice"? Or am I simply wasting my time and should stick to a root *outside* the RAID-set which daily mirroring into /altroot? Thanks for any advice, Stefan
