Subject: Re: RAID1 bootblocks for 2.0 (and more ramblings)
To: None <port-sparc64@netbsd.org>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
List: port-sparc64
Date: 12/12/2004 14:56:55
On Sun, Dec 12, 2004 at 01:35:25PM +0000, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
> [...]
> Some more musings:
> 
> No matter how cleanly I try to shut down the machine, when booting I
> always get
> 
>   /dev/rraid0c: Parity status: DIRTY
>   /dev/rraid0c: Initiating re-write of parity
> 
> and another 3 hour wait for it to sync.  I've even tried shutting down
> to single user, syncing partitions, unmounting them, fscking them and
> then rebooting, but I still get dirty parity.  For good measure, the

This is because of the swap partition, which isn't closed at shutdown.
One way to fix it is to use shutdown instead of reboot. The shutdown hooks
will turn off swap before halting/rebooting.
What I do to work around this, is to have 2 raid partitions on the disks:
one small raid0 with / + swap, and a raid1 with everything else. Only
raid0 will have parity dirty, and as it's small, it doesn't need much time
to sync.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--