Subject: RAIDframe questions
To: NetBSD Current Users <current-users@NetBSD.org>
From: Chris Ross <cross+netbsd@distal.com>
List: current-users
Date: 09/19/2007 14:01:19
While RAIDframe has been around in NetBSD for a really long time,
I haven't used it before. I've been mostly trying to use hardware
RAID, but now have a fabulous opportunity to take one of my non-
RAIDed machines, and put a RAIDframe RAID1 on it. In looking for
information, the best (only?) instructions that seem to be a good
guide are:
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-rf.html
In looking at this guide, however, it reads as something that was
written quite a while ago. There are "changes" noted that were
introduced in NetBSD 2.0, and I'm going to be using NetBSD 4.x for my
machine, so I was wondering if anyone had a guide that was slightly
more up-to-date.
As one of the more important questions I wanted to ask about the
current (or netbsd-4) state of RAIDframe and NetBSD, the above
chapter indicates:
> Warning
>
> Always use shutdown(8) when shutting down. Never simply use reboot
> (8). reboot(8) will not properly run shutdown RC scripts and will
> not safely disable swap. This will cause dirty parity at every reboot.
Is this still true? What's the design philosophy behind this? Is
it reasonable that a command so many people (including myself) expect
to "just work" causes this additional problem? Is there anyway that
I can work around this (other than perhaps moving/removing the reboot
(8) binary)? Personally, I'll be working with a netbsd-4 system,
running on a sparc64.
Thanks much for any assistance available...
- Chris