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On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 12:11:09PM +1000, Daniel Carosone wrote:
> How annoying that they don't put their reserved labels at the start,
> and thus cause such confusion and ambiguity.

I think that would have resulted in more and different confusion.

> But they are accessible through the wd devices, and this does mean
> that the wd0 disklabel needs to be adjusted:

That depends on how the BIOS bits work.  If they simply ignore unknown
disks, we should be OK to use all of wd0.  Or if we say that when the
components are used independently, the BIOS RAID must be turned off.
That appears to be an option on this motherboard, at least.

> There is at least also highpoint and silicon image (both cmdide and
> satalink), and Intel's AHCI. I guess VIA, too, though I've not seen
> one of those, and no doubt others and more to come.

Sure.  I don't think we'll be seeing fewer of these, although I suppose
there's an outside chance that the majority will adopt a common DDF.
Or that the daemon will don ice skates.

> You're going to have even more label-based fun here, if you want to be
> able to boot off the BIOS mirror.  You can (have to) line up the
> labels, so that while ataraid-ld0 spans the entire disk, ld0a for
> root/boot only uses a small amount of space, and the rest (ld0e, say,
> and thus also wd0e and wd1e) is a partition for RAIDframe. =20

Oh, that would be evil.  I'm more likely to ditch the on-board RAID
altogether and use RAIDframe for both.  I don't care about sharing
with other OSes in this case.  I also consider this a non-standard
case.

> All of these complexities are for more advanced setups; it would be
> very nice for the simple end user to have simple BIOS RAID setups Just
> Work, and I think your suggestion is pretty much the way to go for
> that.

Yes.  I'm trying to make the basic setups Just Work without impairing
the reasonable advanced setups.

> Sure.  My point was just to be careful about how we disable the
> component disks as root candidates after the loader has finished and
> the kernel has probed an ataraid ld0; even if findroot() won't use wd0
> or wd1, it should still be in the list for manual selection after
> 'boot -a'.

Oh, right.  That "boot -a".  Never mind my earlier comment...
I don't plan to hinder that.

I have, however, been toying with adding a 'hw.alldisknames' and
keeping the components out of 'hw.disknames'.  (Toying with as in
I have it working here, but I haven't decided if I really like the
idea of changing the semantics of hw.disknames like that).

-allen

--=20
                  Use NetBSD!  http://www.NetBSD.org/

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