Vinum stores configuration information on the disk slices in essentially the same form
as in the configuration files. When reading from the configuration database, Vinum
recognizes a number of keywords which are not allowed in the configuration files. For
example, a disk configuration might contain the following text:
volume myvol state up
volume bigraid state down
plex name myvol.p0 state up org concat vol myvol
plex name myvol.p1 state up org concat vol myvol
plex name myvol.p2 state init org striped 512b vol myvol
plex name bigraid.p0 state initializing org raid5 512b vol bigraid
sd name myvol.p0.s0 drive a plex myvol.p0 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 0b
sd name myvol.p0.s1 drive b plex myvol.p0 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 1048576b
sd name myvol.p1.s0 drive c plex myvol.p1 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 0b
sd name myvol.p1.s1 drive d plex myvol.p1 state up len 1048576b driveoffset 265b plexoffset 1048576b
sd name myvol.p2.s0 drive a plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 0b
sd name myvol.p2.s1 drive b plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 524288b
sd name myvol.p2.s2 drive c plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 1048576b
sd name myvol.p2.s3 drive d plex myvol.p2 state init len 524288b driveoffset 1048841b plexoffset 1572864b
sd name bigraid.p0.s0 drive a plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 0b
sd name bigraid.p0.s1 drive b plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 4194304b
sd name bigraid.p0.s2 drive c plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 8388608b
sd name bigraid.p0.s3 drive d plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 12582912b
sd name bigraid.p0.s4 drive e plex bigraid.p0 state initializing len 4194304b driveoff set 1573129b plexoffset 16777216b
The obvious differences here are the presence of explicit location information and
naming (both of which are also allowed, but discouraged, for use by the user) and the
information on the states (which are not available to the user). Vinum does not store
information about drives in the configuration information: it finds the drives by
scanning the configured disk drives for partitions with a Vinum label. This enables Vinum
to identify drives correctly even if they have been assigned different UNIX® drive IDs.
Note: This information only relates to the historic Vinum implementation. Gvinum always features an automatic
startup once the kernel module is loaded.
In order to start Vinum automatically when you boot the system, ensure that you have
the following line in your /etc/rc.conf:
start_vinum="YES" # set to YES to start vinum
If you do not have a file /etc/rc.conf, create one with this
content. This will cause the system to load the Vinum kld at startup, and to start any objects mentioned in the
configuration. This is done before mounting file systems, so it is possible to
automatically fsck(8) and mount file
systems on Vinum volumes.
When you start Vinum with the vinum start command, Vinum
reads the configuration database from one of the Vinum drives. Under normal
circumstances, each drive contains an identical copy of the configuration database, so it
does not matter which drive is read. After a crash, however, Vinum must determine which
drive was updated most recently and read the configuration from this drive. It then
updates the configuration if necessary from progressively older drives.
