Re: 3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible?
It seems Pete wrote: On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Søren Schmidt wrote: No, thats not the case, the ATA driver has a built in RAID engine to use with Promise and HighPoint controllers. The reason it is like this is that it is nessesary to read the RAID config off the disks in a vendor specific way, and neither of cdd/vinum could do this when its was done. So, if I were to create the RAID-1 volume with atacontrol, I'm tied to using the Promise controller? Could I move the drives to a Highpoint-based controller or just a plain on-board ATA interface and still have the RAID volume accessible? If I want this kind of flexibility, should I move to Vinum? If you want to boot from the array you need to have the array config in a way that fits the controller, if thats not needed you can move around as you see fit, you can even make ATA RAID's on any ATA controller not just Promise or Highpoint as loong as you wont boot from it. I guess I should make an option to atacontrol that can convert between HPT/Promise format or maybe just silently write both to the disks ;) -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message
Re: 3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible?
Pete [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: atacontrol create mirror ad6 ad7 This is starting to _really_ confuse me. Does FreeBSD have two software RAID systems? Yes (vinum and raidframe) Is there something built into the ATA controller drivers that can do software RAID too? It looks that way from that atacontrol and ata man pages. No, but atacontrol knows how to configure hardware RAID controllers such as your Promise FastTrack. Where does Vinum fit in here or is Vinum extraneous now? Vinum is a volume manager with RAID functionality. Is Vinum just a front-end to the ata system? No, it's completely device independent. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message
Re: 3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible?
It seems Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: Pete [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: atacontrol create mirror ad6 ad7 This is starting to _really_ confuse me. Does FreeBSD have two software RAID systems? Yes (vinum and raidframe) And ccd :) Is there something built into the ATA controller drivers that can do software RAID too? It looks that way from that atacontrol and ata man pages. No, but atacontrol knows how to configure hardware RAID controllers such as your Promise FastTrack. No, thats not the case, the ATA driver has a built in RAID engine to use with Promise and HighPoint controllers. The reason it is like this is that it is nessesary to read the RAID config off the disks in a vendor specific way, and neither of cdd/vinum could do this when its was done. ATA RAID's like the Promise Fasttrak are *not* HW RAID's its a SW RAID engine in the BIOS on those cards. However that is only used for booting from the RAID, and then the ATA driver picks up the array config and uses that with its internal SW RAID engine. Atacontrol just sees a generic ATA RAID interface, and the ATA driver then knows how to r/w the config for a specific controller. -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message
Re: 3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible?
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Søren Schmidt wrote: No, thats not the case, the ATA driver has a built in RAID engine to use with Promise and HighPoint controllers. The reason it is like this is that it is nessesary to read the RAID config off the disks in a vendor specific way, and neither of cdd/vinum could do this when its was done. So, if I were to create the RAID-1 volume with atacontrol, I'm tied to using the Promise controller? Could I move the drives to a Highpoint-based controller or just a plain on-board ATA interface and still have the RAID volume accessible? If I want this kind of flexibility, should I move to Vinum? Thanks again for taking the time to clear all of this up. I really appreciate it. pete To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message
Re: 3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible?
It seems Pete wrote: Hello, I've been posting about this since the beginning on the year. A few times on freebsd-questions, once on freebsd-hackers, and submitted a PR (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=48165). I have never found a solution beyond replacing FreeBSD with Linux. (Which is not something I'd like to do, but know I can, if need be. I'm trying to learn about FreeBSD, not Linux.) To make it short, the disklabel problem is probably due to the disk containing what disklabel see as a bogus label, try to zero out the label by using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adN count=100. Now if you have a promise fasttrak its beyond me why you want to use vinum to make a mirror... In the post you refer to you have: ar0: 29314MB ATA RAID0 array [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad4: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 ar1: 29314MB ATA RAID0 array [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad6: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata3-master UDMA100 ar2: 29314MB ATA RAID0 array [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad7: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata3-slave UDMA100 You use ar0 as a single disk and thats fine. Then you need a mirror of ad6 and ad7 to get that you first need to delete ar1 and ar2 (which you have defined in the Promise BIOS to get it past probing right ?). So doing: atacontrol delete ar1 atacontrol delete ar2 Get you rid of those two 1 disk arrays, then do: atacontrol create mirror ad6 ad7 and you get a new ar1 array thats the mirror of ad6 ad7.. Disklabel newfs ar1 and you are done (remember the dd trick above if disklabel thinks the label is bogus) -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message
Re: 3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible?
On Sun, 09 Mar 2003, Soeren Schmidt wrote: To make it short, the disklabel problem is probably due to the disk containing what disklabel see as a bogus label, try to zero out the label by using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adN count=100. This is what I initially thought, but when I swapped the two data drives, disklabel thought the previous ar2's (and now ar1's) disklabel was fine. The drive that used to be ar1 and that had a valid disklabel before swapping now had a bogus label. (Did that description make sense?) Now if you have a promise fasttrak its beyond me why you want to use vinum to make a mirror... Well... a) I want to learn about FreeBSD, not the Promise controller. Until this email, I was thinking the only way to do software RAID with FreeBSD was Vinum... Now, I'm (more) confused. b) The Fasttrak controller isn't that wonderful and from what I've read, just software RAID on the card's PROM. I've also heard (and briefly confirmed) that Linux's software RAID is faster than the card's. I'm betting that FreeBSD's is comparable to Linux's. c) I don't want to be tied to a specific vendor's RAID. This machine is made from old, spare parts. If the Fasttrak card were to die, I'd love to be able to stick in a different IDE controller and still have the RAID working with little or no fuss. In the post you refer to you have: ar0: 29314MB ATA RAID0 array [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad4: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 ar1: 29314MB ATA RAID0 array [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad6: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata3-master UDMA100 ar2: 29314MB ATA RAID0 array [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad7: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata3-slave UDMA100 FWIW, I'm currently using a 2 controller config with each drive on its own dedicated IDE channel. The second controller is just a straight Promise controller, not a Fasttrak. You use ar0 as a single disk and thats fine. Then you need a mirror of ad6 and ad7 to get that you first need to delete ar1 and ar2 (which you have defined in the Promise BIOS to get it past probing right ?). When all three disks were on the Fasttrak, I did have them all defined as single-disk, striped volumes. I needed to do this to boot from ar0/ad4. Right now, I don't know why I set the other two to be single-disk, striped volumes. When I moved the latter two disks to the second controller, they still booted as ar1 and ar2 (ad8 on ar1 and ad10 on ar2), but I had no controller BIOS to tweak. I just guessed that that was how FreeBSD treated drives on these controllers. So doing: atacontrol delete ar1 atacontrol delete ar2 Now this was interesting. I did this, then rebooted. This is what I get now: ad8: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata4-master UDMA100 ad10: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata5-master UDMA100 ar0: 29314MB ATA RAID0 array [3737/255/63] status: READY subdisks: 0 READY ad4: 29314MB IBM-DTLA-307030 [59560/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA100 atacontrol create mirror ad6 ad7 This is starting to _really_ confuse me. Does FreeBSD have two software RAID systems? Is there something built into the ATA controller drivers that can do software RAID too? It looks that way from that atacontrol and ata man pages. Where does Vinum fit in here or is Vinum extraneous now? Is Vinum just a front-end to the ata system? I'm sooo confused... and you get a new ar1 array thats the mirror of ad6 ad7.. Indeed I do. Disklabel newfs ar1 and you are done (remember the dd trick above if disklabel thinks the label is bogus) Excellent! It looks like this is what I was looking for. Thank you so very much, Søren. pete To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message
3 IDE devices on Promise card + FreeBSD == not possible?
Hello, I've been posting about this since the beginning on the year. A few times on freebsd-questions, once on freebsd-hackers, and submitted a PR (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=48165). I have never found a solution beyond replacing FreeBSD with Linux. (Which is not something I'd like to do, but know I can, if need be. I'm trying to learn about FreeBSD, not Linux.) The main problem seems to be that I cannot have more than two IDE drives on a Promise IDE card (or cards, for that matter). They work fine with two drives attached. The actual drive attached, where it's attached, and the card it's attached to does not seem to matter. However things are configured, whatever drive is enumerated as ar2 cannot be accessed by disklabel (and vinum and possibly other disk-level utils). Please see my original post at: http://news.gw.com/freebsd.questions/122487. I really hope somebody can help me with this. I'm more than willing to try things and provide whatever debugging info you'd like to see. I currently have all my data on ar0, but a lot of that is digital photos that I don't want to trust to the health of just one drive. I really want to get ar1 and ar2 working as a mirrored volume and move all the data to this, but FreeBSD (and, most likely, my corresponding lack of knowledge) has kept me from doing this. I _really_ don't want to move to Linux, but I've been trying to solve this problem for over three months now and if I can't get FreeBSD to do it. I know I can get Linux to do it. Please don't let it come to that. I'm just very frustrated and tried every avenue I know of. Thanks, pete To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-hackers in the body of the message
