The GENERIC
kernel does not contain
vinum
. It is possible to build a
custom kernel which includes vinum
, but
this is not recommended. The standard way to start
vinum
is as a kernel module.
kldload(8) is not needed because when gvinum(8)
starts, 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
allowed but discouraged, and the information on the states.
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.
Gvinum always features an
automatic startup once the kernel module is loaded, via
loader.conf(5). To load the
Gvinum module at boot time, add
geom_vinum_load="YES"
to
/boot/loader.conf
.
When vinum
is started with
gvinum start
,
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.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.