On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 02:01:19PM -0400, Chris Ross wrote:
>   While RAIDframe has been around in NetBSD for a really long time,  
> I haven't used it before.  I've been mostly trying to use hardware  
> RAID, but now have a fabulous opportunity to take one of my non- 
> RAIDed machines, and put a RAIDframe RAID1 on it.  In looking for  
> information, the best (only?) instructions that seem to be a good  
> guide are:
> 
> http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-rf.html
> 
>   In looking at this guide, however, it reads as something that was  
> written quite a while ago.  There are "changes" noted that were  
> introduced in NetBSD 2.0, and I'm going to be using NetBSD 4.x for my  
> machine, so I was wondering if anyone had a guide that was slightly  
> more up-to-date.


It still applies to NetBSD 4.0 as well.  RAIDframe setup hasn't really
changed since 2.0.


>   As one of the more important questions I wanted to ask about the  
> current (or netbsd-4) state of RAIDframe and NetBSD, the above  
> chapter indicates:
> 
> >Warning
> >
> >Always use shutdown(8)  when shutting down. Never simply use reboot 
> >(8). reboot(8)  will not properly run shutdown RC scripts and will  
> >not safely disable swap. This will cause dirty parity at every reboot.
> 
>   Is this still true?  What's the design philosophy behind this?  Is  
> it reasonable that a command so many people (including myself) expect  
> to "just work" causes this additional problem?  Is there anyway that  
> I can work around this (other than perhaps moving/removing the reboot 
> (8) binary)?  Personally, I'll be working with a netbsd-4 system,  
> running on a sparc64.
> 
>   Thanks much for any assistance available...


IF you have swap configured on the RAID, you must either use shutdown(8) or
unconfigure the swap manually before running halt/reboot(8).  Otherwise the
RAID set will be dirty after reboot.  I used to alias halt/reboot to "echo
Please use shutdown(8) instead" or something like that.  But I've just made
it a proper habit to always use shutdown (except when in single user mode).


	Geert