[linux-lvm] More thoughts on Linux LVM+RAID
CHUCK_MUNRO at HP-Canada-om1.om.hp.com
CHUCK_MUNRO at HP-Canada-om1.om.hp.com
Wed Sep 1 20:00:11 UTC 1999
I have been reading the thread regarding Linux RAID and LVM with great interest
(since joining the list today :-). Please forgive this new thread ... I still
need to learn how to use the list properly.
I have been using HP LVM with mirroring for several years, and have come to
expect this arrangement to be configurable without a lot of fuss on HP-UX
machines. For this reason I am very interested in seeing the same
functionality on Linux.
Let's hope the LVM petition succeeds, but are we not dangerously close to
Linus' freeze date?
I currently use Linux MD mirroring on my firewall/web-server machine at home,
but have discovered that recovery from disk faults is NOT painless :-) I
implemented full mirroring of the entire boot process by using a Promise
FastTRACK IDE RAID card to boot a tiny mirrored DOS C: drive (the card nicely
provides this in its own BIOS). From there I use loadlin to boot an initrd
Linux, which activates a RAID-1 root filesystem, switches to it, and so on
......
This is soooo UGLY, but it has rescued my firewall twice so far.
I would like to encourage a merge of LVM and RAID (at least RAID-0 and 1), with
the realization that the ease with which HP-UX boots a mirrored root disk would
involve a lot of kernel changes in Linux.
One remaining snag would then be to work around the BIOS' inability to
recognize a secondary boot path if the primary one fails (which HP machines
have been able to do for many years). I can't think of any solution here
except for a Promise-like bit of IDE hardware. The current crop of SCSI
hardware-RAID controllers (AMI, Mylex, DPT, etc.) are just too expensive for my
personal budget.
My 2 cents' worth, anyway.
Sincere thanks for the great work with LVM!
Chuck Munro
chuck_munro at hp.com
More information about the linux-lvm
mailing list