raidframe on > 2TB disks, revisited

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Hi,

It still seems absurdly difficult to set up a mirror with two disks larger 
than 2 TB.

One, people shouldn't have to keep around a PS/2 keyboard to specify a 
root filesystem. No amd64 system that I have ever used with a USB keyboard 
works when trying to specify the root with -a.

Two, some part of newfs seems to be broken or my understanding of it is 
broken:

# newfs -O2 -b 65536 -f 8192 -F -s 7772092288 /dev/rraid0a
/dev/rraid0a: 3794967.0MB (7772092288 sectors) block size 65536, fragment 
size 8192
        using 1160 cylinder groups of 3271.56MB, 52345 blks, 103936 inodes.
wtfs: write error for sector 7772092287: Invalid argument

However, with the same RAIDframe device, /dev/rraid0d works. But 
autoconfigure only autoconfigures raid0a, so a kernel has to be compiled 
with:

config		netbsd	root on raid0d type ?

So, in order to have a bootable, mirrored set of drives larger than 2 TB, 
one has to:

1) Create gpt wedges on both drives for a small ffs filesystem, swap, and 
a large RAID

2) newfs the small ffs filesystems and copy a kernel compiled with "netbsd 
root on raid0d" onto both ffs filesystems

gpt biosboot -i 1 both disks

Configure the RAID mirror, manually create a disklabel with 2^32-1 sectors 
for raid0d as type 4.2BSD

newfs -F -s (the number of sectors in raid0) -O2 /dev/rraid0d

It seems a bit convoluted. It'd be nice if we could:

1) have RAIDframe autoconfigure something other than raid0a
or
2) use GPT wedges in raid0 and have that work with autoconfigure
or
3) compile a kernel with a dk wedge set as root
or
4) simply boot a kernel in GPT which is in RAIDframe which is in GPT.

Thanks,
John