Subject: RAID stuff
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Jon Buller <jon@bullers.net>
List: current-users
Date: 01/15/2003 19:57:50
A couple of questions about RAID (on my sparc in particular, but
I don't expect to to be MD...)

The raidctl man page says:

     -P dev  Check the status of the parity on the RAID set, and initialize
             (re-write) the parity if the parity is not known to be up-to-
             date.  This is normally used after a system crash (and before a
             fsck(8)) to ensure the integrity of the parity.

but /etc/rc.d has this:

     $ egrep 'PROVIDE|REQUIRE' raid*
     raidframe:# PROVIDE: disks
     raidframeparity:# REQUIRE: quota

Isn't "REQUIRE: quota" a bit late in the process to be "before a
fsck(8)"? Would it be bad to make the egrep output read like this
instead:

     raidframe:# PROVIDE: raidframeconfig
     raidframeparity:# REQUIRE: raidframeconfig
     raidframeparity:# PROVIDE: disks

(i.e. move the parity stuff way up in the startup list.  It does
all run in the background anyway, although that might cause some
disk seek contention with fsck if they both run at the same time...)

Perhaps related to this is that every time I boot my machine, I
get a couple of messages late in the process:

     raidctl: unable to open device file: raid0
     raidctl: unable to open device file: raid1

And this is annoying:

     $ raidctl -s raid0
     raidctl: unable to open device file: raid0
     $ raidctl -s raid1
     raidctl: unable to open device file: raid1
     $ df
     Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
     /dev/sd0a     1843021  1375444    375425    78%    /
     /dev/raid1c    632427    88150    512655    14%    /home
     /dev/raid0c   1277290   530900    682524    43%    /mnt
     kernfs              1        1         0   100%    /kern
     procfs              4        4         0   100%    /proc

However, I can work around that with "raidctl -s /dev/rraid0c" when
needed.  Is this normal behaviour, a bug, or a broken setup?

Mostly just curious, but slightly worried as well,

Jon