vinum
assigns default names to
plexes and subdisks, although they may be overridden.
Overriding the default names is not recommended as it does not
bring a significant advantage and it can cause
confusion.
Names may contain any non-blank character, but it is recommended to restrict them to letters, digits and the underscore characters. The names of volumes, plexes, and subdisks may be up to 64 characters long, and the names of drives may be up to 32 characters long.
vinum
objects are assigned device
nodes in the hierarchy /dev/gvinum
. The configuration
shown above would cause vinum
to create
the following device nodes:
Device entries for each volume. These are the main
devices used by vinum
. The
configuration above would include the devices
/dev/gvinum/myvol
,
/dev/gvinum/mirror
,
/dev/gvinum/striped
,
/dev/gvinum/raid5
and /dev/gvinum/raid10
.
All volumes get direct entries under
/dev/gvinum/
.
The directories
/dev/gvinum/plex
, and
/dev/gvinum/sd
, which
contain device nodes for each plex and for each subdisk,
respectively.
For example, consider the following configuration file:
After processing this file, gvinum(8) creates the
following structure in /dev/gvinum
:
Although it is recommended that plexes and subdisks should
not be allocated specific names,
vinum
drives must be named. This makes
it possible to move a drive to a different location and still
recognize it automatically. Drive names may be up to 32
characters long.
Volumes appear to the system to be identical to disks,
with one exception. Unlike UNIX® drives,
vinum
does not partition volumes,
which thus do not contain a partition table. This has
required modification to some disk utilities, notably
newfs(8), so that it does not try to interpret the last
letter of a vinum
volume name as a
partition identifier. For example, a disk drive may have a
name like /dev/ad0a
or /dev/da2h
. These
names represent the first partition
(a
) on the first (0) IDE disk
(ad
) and the eighth partition
(h
) on the third (2) SCSI disk
(da
) respectively. By contrast, a
vinum
volume might be called
/dev/gvinum/concat
,
which has no relationship with a partition name.
In order to create a file system on this volume, use newfs(8):
#
newfs /dev/gvinum/concat
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>.