The GENERIC
kernel does not contain
Vinum. It is possible to build a special kernel which includes
Vinum, but this is not recommended. The standard way to start
Vinum is as a kernel module (kld). You do
not even need to use kldload(8) for Vinum: when you start
gvinum(8), it checks whether the module has been loaded, and
if it is not, it loads it automatically.
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:
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.
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
:
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.
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