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On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 10:46:10AM +1000, Daniel Carosone wrote:
> (you've already decided against this idea, but even so...)

Largely.  Although I'm still open to hearing a compelling reason to
continue to consider it.

> This also strikes me as unlikely to work if the BIOS RAID is a pure
> mirror of identical drives - won't the sizes be the same inside and
> outside the ld/wd disklabel?

At least in the cases I've seen, the configuration is stored on the
disk in reserved sectors (and those sectors are not accessible through
the RAID).

> Finally: The only immediate problem I can see with disabling (or
> preempting) the component drives for findroot (by default, overridable
> via hardwired config root) is if these BIOS RAID tools allow partial
> or mixed RAID ld volumes on the one disk, rather than working only

I haven't seen this yet, but I've only used the Promise and Adaptec
BIOS.

> For example: a small mirrored root 'volume'
> for booting and some other RAID level for the rest,

I'd actually like to be able to do this here, so I'll probably go
ahead and end up using RAIDframe on these machines now.

> While such things might seem best done with RAIDFrame under NetBSD, a
> BIOS RAID config might be sharable between several OS's - or allow

Yes.  This was one reason that I wanted to preserve the data that was
already on a disk when Jason did the Promise ATA RAID support.

> The common case would be for booting from a BIOS mirror, and thus it's
> probably a sensible default; it might be nice if wdN were still
> available as choices for 'boot -a' though, as well as tweakable with
> kernel config.

Yah.  As long as the BIOS sees the components, the loader should be
able to use them.

-allen

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