Re: Switchover to CAM ATA?

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 10:33:27AM -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> I've read most of this thread.  I think this is cool technology.
> However, before we move forward with this, we need to have a plan for
> the various issues that have come up.  The plan needs to be specific,
> have owners for key items, warnings about ownerless == obsoleted, and
> target dates.
> 
> I think this is one of the cases where we should record the plan of
> record on a wiki.  It worked well for other times we've had big,
> disruptive changes.
> 
> My opinion for the path forward:
> (1) Send a big heads up about the future of ataraid(5).  It will be
>     shot in the head soon, to be replaced be a bunch of geom classes
>     for each different container format.  At least that seems to be
>     the rough consensus I've seen so far.  We need worker bees to do
>     many of these classes, although much can be mined from the ataraid
>     code today.

This shouldn't be a bunch of GEOM classes. This should one class which
recognize multiple formats, just like the LABEL class.
I don't think it is feasible to reuse gmirror for that, it wasn't
designed in something like this in mind.

> (2) Send another big heads up strongly recommending people go to
>     glabel based fstabs.  Maybe the right option here is to provide a
>     simple script walk people through the conversion.  This will
>     render the carnage of ad -> ada (or da) a mostly non-event, and
>     also protect people from 'oops' of rebooting with that thumb drive
>     in the system.
> (3) Create a wiki to record all the new geom classes needed.  Find
>     people to own each one, or note it is unowned, and support will be
>     dropped if no owner can be found.
> (4) sysinstall should default to creating label systems, if it doesn't
>     already.
> (5) Issues with glabel and ataraid(5) need an owner, and need to be
>     resolved, since the device names here are likely to change.

What are the issues?

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheelsystems.com
pjd_at_FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
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