The work have been under testing and fixing since then, and it is mature enough
to be put into HEAD for further testing.
A lot have changed in this time, and here are the most important:
- Gvinum now uses one single workerthread instead of one thread for each
volume and each plex. The reason for this is that the previous scheme was
very complex, and was the cause of many of the bugs discovered in gvinum.
Instead, gvinum now uses one worker thread with an event queue, quite
similar to what used in gmirror.
- The rebuild/grow/initialize/parity check routines no longer runs in
separate threads, but are run as regular I/O requests with special flags.
This made it easier to support mounted growing and parity rebuild.
- Support for growing striped and raid5-plexes, meaning that one can extend the
volumes for these plex types in addition to the concat type. Also works while
the volume is mounted.
- Implementation of many of the missing commands from the old vinum:
attach/detach, start (was partially implemented), stop (was partially
implemented), concat, mirror, stripe, raid5 (shortcuts for creating volumes
with one plex of these organizations).
- The parity check and rebuild no longer goes between userland/kernel, meaning
that the gvinum command will not stay and wait forever for the rebuild to
finish. You can instead watch the status with the list command.
- Many problems with gvinum have been reported since 5.x, and some has been hard
to fix due to the complicated architecture. Hopefully, it should be more
stable and better handle edge cases that previously made gvinum crash.
- Failed drives no longer disappears entirely, but now leave behind a dummy
drive that makes sure the original state is not forgotten in case the system
is rebooted between drive failures/swaps.
- Update manpage to reflect new commands and extend it with some examples.
Sponsored by: Google Summer of Code 2007
Mentored by: le
Tested by: Rick C. Petty <rick-freebsd2008 -at- kiwi-computer.com>
Analogous to the drive level, give each volume and plex a worker thread
that picks up and processes incoming and completed BIOs.
This should fix the data corruption issues that have come up a few
weeks ago and improve performance, especially of RAID5 plexes.
The volume level needs a little work, though.
