Re: What can vinum and geom do?

From: Martin Neitzel (neitzel_at_gaertner.de)
Date: 10/28/04 

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 22:20:54 GMT

I am using vinum on FreeBSD-4.7 on my 486 with its --compared to prior
times-- gargantuan 40Gig disk and I love it.

Almost everything of this disk is allocated for a single vinum'ed
BSD partition. My motivation for using vinum wasn't RAID stuff or
larger-than-disk filesystems, though.

I slice off lots of volumes to get different filesystems allowing for
finely tuned individual backup policies. No more shortage of fdisk
slices or disklabel partitions. If the volume (-> fs) sizes turn out to
be too small or too large chosen, I can easily construct better fitting
volumes and move things around.

(I also decided for myself to use a common size for slicing off vinum
"subdisks". That way, it will be easier to reuse freed subdisks.)

MT> - have you ever tried to read the vinum documentation -

I also like the vinum documentation. When I started out, I found the
vinum chapter in the Handbook helpful. I has a few nice diagrams showing
what configurations are possible. The vinum manpage is dauntingly long
but actually very well written. Yes, it's a long read. Then again,

Running 4.7, I never used GEOM so far.

                                                        Martin Neitzel

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