HEADSUP: geom_vinum committed

Dear hackers,

I've just committed a first geomified version of vinum, surprisingly
called geom_vinum.

Please read on before you all go out and run your cvsups, as
there are some things to note:

*) It's not yet connected to the build, as it is not really finished
    yet, but I wanted to give you something to play around with.  Some
    functions of the 'old' vinum aren't implemented yet, some will never
    be, as they aren't needed anymore, or where I don't see a real reason
    to bring them over.

*) As if you wouldn't have guessed: don't use it on important data.
    It probably won't set your box on fire, but you never know.

*) You can use it on your existing vinum setup, as it uses the same
    on-disk configuration format.  But don't run both vinum and
    geom_vinum and the same time.

*) You shouldn't need to label any desired slice as type vinum with
    bsdlabel(8) anymore.  In theory, you should be able to dedicate a
    whole disk to geom_vinum (i.e. 'drive bigstuff device /dev/ad2').

*) Don't unload the module if you have valid objects in your setup.  Due
    to a bug in GEOM this will either panic or deadlock.  You can pick up
    a patch at <http://people.freebsd.org/~le/geom_subr.c.diff> and
    rebuild your kernel, then you can safely unload the KLD again.

*) If you want to test it:

    cd /sys/modules/geom/geom_vinum
    make && make install
    cd /usr/src/sbin/gvinum
    make && make install

    You can then run 'gvinum' (which will load the KLD) and create
    objects like in the 'old' vinum.  The volumes will appear as devices
    in /dev/gvinum/.

Bug reports, suggestions, critics and flames are happily awaited, even
more so when they have patches attached. :-)

Thanks,
le

-- 
Lukas Ertl                         http://homepage.univie.ac.at/l.ertl/
le_at_FreeBSD.org                     http://people.freebsd.org/~le/