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Old 22nd September 2009
sherekhan sherekhan is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Norway
Posts: 7
Default Rebuilding RAIDframe mirror after crash/power failure

I am setting up a new computer with OpenBSD, and have decided to try RAIDframe on it. I have set up two identical 10 GB disks with minimal a-partitions containing a kernel with RAIDframe support and a boot.conf to enable serial console, and b-partitions set up as a RAIDframe mirror, which in turn contains my root, swap and everything else.

I am not running a UPS on this computer, and while power failures are rare in my home they may happen. There is also the slim possibility of a crash, although I think that in all the years I've been using OpenBSD (since 3.4) I can still count all the crash incidents without running out of fingers on my first hand. Still, I have forced a power failure on the computer to see how it coped with that, and I was less than impressed with the time it took to bring the computer back up. The initial mirroring of the drives when I first set them up (raidctl -vi) took like 10-15 minutes, but when rebooting with an out of sync mirror it takes closer to an hour to bring the mirror back up. And the computer is unusable in this time.

- Why does rebuilding take so long?
- Is there anything I can do to speed this process up?
- Is it possible to let the computer boot into multiuser with all services running even with a dirty mirror, and then let it rebuild in the background?
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