Storage

8, 16, 32, 64…

我在有生之年会不会看到需要用128bit来表达的存储呢？

快被盘阵折腾得精疲力尽的delphij和quakelee总算看到了一点曙光——quakelee同学总算在周五晚上把盘阵搞死了。

今天他说盘阵终于进入了调试界面。不管怎么说，困扰我们许久的盘阵的问题，总算是有了一点眉目。不知道台北普安科技(InfoTrend)的工程师是否能看出些端倪并修正firmware。但愿如此，我已经把我的MSN头像换成关公了。

半年了，我再也忍不住了，今天我一定要骂人。

从春节到现在，几个月？春节、五一，是不是这些厂商还想看着我们这样过到十一、新年，乃至下一个春节？

凌晨三点半被同事的电话叫醒，说是……

You can obtain and test it here:

http://people.freebsd.org/~delphij/MFC-RELENG_5_4/patch-mpt

Today I have experienced how to install FreeBSD from a USB device - quite simple so you can do it yourself :-)

First, initialize the USB solid state disk with bsdlabel(8):

bsdlabel -wB /dev/da0

Then, initialize a file system:

newfs -O1 /dev/da0a

Third, copy CDROM’s /boot to it.

And you can now boot from the USB disk.

So I finally tried DragonFly on one of our test servers (not my desktop :-). It seems that DragonFly still have some issues with the SATA devices. I am trying to fix it, maybe by porting some good FreeBSD ATAng code.

DragonFly has gave us some good examples that how a user-friendly operating system should, and some different way on designing a MP-capable architecture. Thanks, Matt!

And finally, it happend.

On Monday, one of our server, running FreeBSD, panic’ed with “ffs_clusteralloc: map mismatch”. This message is quite uncommon and should only happen when there is some “event” with the memory or hard disk.

I have suggested our administrator to reboot and do “fsck” on the volume, since it has very small block size and can not be checked background (I have made a change to warn about this to FreeBSD, and was MFC’ed to 5-STABLE so you will get the feature in 5.4-RELEASE). Unfortunatelly, the check is so slow and we start to suspect whether there is some hardware problem.

Someone has disclosed that he is implementing iSCSI on FreeBSD, at scsi@. iSCSI is essential technology that is highly scalable and looks quite promising.

It seems that if one host is fsck’ing and the other is trying to boot, then the controller will halt. I’m so tired and sick about this!

About 9 Years ago, FreeBSD has introduced a functionality in sysinstall(8)’s partition editor, which is to mark a partition “active”.

However, unfortunatelly, the implementation contained a flow from the day 0 it was introduced. Sysinstall(8) depends on user’s sanity not to mark only one partition as active on one disk.

This turned out to a potential damage of disk partition table. With two partitions marked “ACTIVE”, you will get the following message:

“Invalid partition table.”

Then system will halt.