>Number:         8882
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       various raidframe suckage
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    kern-bug-people (Kernel Bug People)
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Fri Nov 26 09:18:01 1999
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Joel N. Weber II
>Organization:
Red Bean Software/Gratuitous Organization for Gratuitous Software Enhancement
>Release:        1.4 branch, checked out from CVS a week ago
>Environment:
Note that this is really a post 1.4.1 version in the 1.4 branch
System: NetBSD duality 1.4.1 NetBSD 1.4.1 (XANTHINE) #0: Thu Nov 25 14:00:04 EST 1999 nemo@duality:/usr/src/syssrc/sys/arch/i386/compile/XANTHINE i386


>Description:
So I did raidctl -C, and then raidctl -i, without doing raidctl -I first,
and noticed a number of things that sucked:

1) If you're running raidctl remotely, you won't see any diagnostics unless
you run dmesg every now and then.  It would be really nice if raidctl could
print errors on the tty raidctl is running on.

2) When you do raidctl -i without doing raidctl -I, you get a cryptic error
about the second of the two devices in your mirror being hosed.  More explicit
diagnostics would be good.  So would a manpage which made sure that the casual
reader became aware of the right sequence for initializing the RAID.

The raidctl manpage is also a bit confusing and overwhelming when you first
read it.  It would be nice if it discussed how to initialize a raid device, and
then went over the various recovery options.

3) Apparently when you haven't done raidctl -I to either partition, NetBSD
chooses one as random as being the unhosed partition.  I suspect that the code
that checks for `all but one' partition having the same label should be changed
to make sure that at least two partitions have the same label.  It also seems
to me that having some signature which is present on all partitions with raid
labels that actually gets checked would be very useful here, so that when you
have two partitions with no raid label, rather than saying `oh, gee, they have
different raid labels', you know that they actually don't have raid labels.

>How-To-Repeat:
>Fix:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: