View Single Post
Old 25th September 2011
jggimi's Avatar
jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
Default

Reviving this old thread to say that as of 19 September, root-on-RAID is now possible with softraid(4) on -current, and will be in 5.1-release next spring. I have tested, and will be converting my one RAIDframe server to softraid(4) tomorrow.

It operates in similar fashion to RAIDframe, requiring boot of a kernel from a non-RAIO partition. In this implementation, if that partition is on a drive containing one of the RAID chunks, the "a" partition will be used as the root partition by the kernel. This avoids one of the reasons for a RAIDframe custom kernel.

The bioctl(8) tool is certainly simpler to use than raidctl(8), there is no need to have complex configuration files -- RAIDframe was designed for the testing of complex RAID array designs, rather than production use.

Restoration after a chunk failure is simple and easy. RAIDframe has many more options, including the ability to manage mirrors for data replication and instant recovery -- such as intentionally breaking mirrors and later rejoining them and possibly doing an instant recovery from a "saved" mirror -- but I no longer need those advanced features.

My thanks to Ocicat, who pointed me to this week's CVS log entry.
Reply With Quote