Preparing BSDCan2007

There is a long time that I didn’t post here…. Hopefully Volker is very active on the FreeNAS code and on this blog :-)

I’m preparing my travel to Ottawa for BSDCan2007. I will try to put some photos and day-to-day comments about this event and conferences.

I will present this paper about FreeNAS: I hope that my spoken English will be understandable :-)

About FreeNAS actual work: I’ve replaced geom_raid5 module by a new release.I found a little bug that crash the system when trying to remove inexistent disk to an inexistent raid5 volume (for example “graid5 remove nonexistentvolume ad12” crash FreeNAS ).
Arne fix this bug in few minutes, and it will be include in the next release.

There is a high performance geom_raid5 module (TNG) too, but I will wait more test about his module before to replace the actual by FreeNAS.

I’ve meet a big temporary limitation by choosing to use GPT for formatting drive: The actual version of the FreeBSD gpt tools doesn’t permit to increase the size of a GPT partition.

Then I can’t use the cool features of geom_raid5: Adding a disk to an existing geom_raid5 volume , or replacing each disk one-by-one by bigger disk. All this step works great when working directly on the graid5 volume (“/dev/raid5/bigdrive” for example) because it doesn’t use partition, and need only a ‘growfs’. But if you create a MBR partition on it (“/dev/raid5/bigdrives1” for example), you need to modify the partition size before to use growfs.

Hoppefully, Marcel Moolenaar are working on a replacement of the gpt tools that will support GPT partition re-size.

I must now fix some bugs on the actual working release (regarding the mount tools about graid5 volume) and I must create a new method for installing FreeNAS… And this step is an hard step!