[linux-lvm] Another strange setup by a newbie, but strange oops resulted whiletrying vgextend/vgmerge!

[Daniel Mitzlaff <hackbyte gmx de>]

Hello there, first, i'm new to LVM but i understand the concepts ? it's 
nice;)
2nd thing, YES i REALLY know what i do ? even if it seems that i don't.. 
;)

Ok, just my setup: A Clear RH6.2 w/ kernel 2.2.14 "-5.0" from the rh cd, 
running on a 266K6 w/ DFI Board (wintel TX chipset) + a Adaptec AHA2940AU 
(AIC-7861).
DDRS39130W	9,1G/SDA
DDRS34560W	4,3G/SDB
DTLA307015		15G/HDA
DJNA352030		20G/HDB
DTLA307045		45G/HDD
DTTA351010		10G/HDC
I think, it's cool to use the SCSI drives to boot from plain ext2 
partitions (for some security and recovery reasons), and let the kernel 
handle 2 swap partitions with the same priority (which will let the 
kernel interleave and stripe the swap space itself ? whoa, boosting swap 
performace;).
Ok, then i want to build a big vg over all drives. Create a LV with 2 
stripes (hoping that it will everytime use 2 different busses;) and a 
small LV using the left free extends on the VG.

First, i ran into the same problems as reported before here on the list, 
vgmerge and vgextend give me OOPS while extending the LE counter for the 
VG.
BUT, all my drives are filled up with data, there's NO BACKUP(!), and no 
way to take more than a single drive free for reformatting.
So, i tried the patches sent by Heinz ? not really knowing where to patch 
it ? in the lvm-userland, recompiled ? no change at all. Please, tell me 
if it is correct to use the patch at the userland-tools instead of 
patching the kernel-parts. And, can you tell me (and others) in which 
order we have to see the patch?, plain patch for native LVM0.9, are there 
other patches? (CVS snapshots are no choice!)
Ok, next ->
What the heck are you guy's doing? I use a native RH6.2 installation w/o 
any updates/fixes (except for network security), using 2.2.17 and 2.2.18 
kernel-tarballs (the ..17 patches works well on ..18, only a few rejects 
which can easily inserted by hand;). But you CAN'T release a version that 
does not work w/o telling users if they had to look at some dependencies! 
(if there are some, remember i use a really clear RH6.2!)

Ok, so please tell me where i can get a release that works on my server, 
it isn't uncool to me if i had to use an old but STABLE version ? but 
tell the users in all your released files WHICH version IS definitively 
STABLE.
Yes, as you can see, i read the complete ML about this problem, i found 
reports and patches adressing this, but there's no help. And don't think 
all your users, who want to use LVM, are able to use CVS snapshots (i 
never use cvs snapshots on my server ? release is release ? features 
against bugs;).
Grmpf, ok all my frustration is left out, what can we do? ;)
greetings, hackbyte -> hackbyte gmx de, IRCNet hackbyte @ #linux.de, 
+linux.de