On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 11:35:45AM +0100, Markus Kolb wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am thinking of switching to NetBSD.
> But I need a Logical Volume Management solution for resizing partitions
> and at least expanding the fs on them and I can't find any up-to-date
> information related to this.
> - Vinum is removed
> - ccd seems to only concatenate different physical disks
> - dk wedges seem to be for partitioning big disks or have I misunderstood?
> 
> If there is anything with PV, PVGroups, LVGroups and LVolumes possible
> how is it called in NetBSD?

Yes, vinum was removed because it was not really being maintained, and
had some bitrot problems.  ccds will span across multiple physical
disks, but isn't the dynamic volume manager that you're looking for.

I don't want to try to speak for mycroft, but my understanding of
his idea of wedges was that they are just simple things, which use
the strategy functionality to route requests to different areas
on the block device(s). Something crafted on top of this could provide
a nice, light volume manager.

I think I've been using wedges for over a year on my laptop, and
wouldn't describe it as having a big disk (60 GB isn't a large disk,
and not all of it is dedicated to NetBSD).

In general, though, you're right - volume management is something we
need to do better.  Whether that's by gobbing the disks altogether in
a pool a la ZFS is something we want to do (and I should imagine the
security types would have a view on that), or by going the more
traditional route with volume management (see the wedges route above),
we need to start looking into this more fully. Especially as our
iSCSI initiator (plug, plug) now exists and works well.

I'd be really interested in talking about this, though it might be
better hosted on tech-kern.

Regards,
Alistair