Aaron Kulkis wrote:
Jim Flanagan wrote:
Hi,
On my new 10.3 install I set up 2 drives in raid1 mirror, using software raid in yast. All seems to be working fine except in Kinfocenter>memory swap is shown as not available. Yast shows swap with an "*" beside it. My partitions are set up as follows: primary /dev/md0 /boot extended /dev/md1 /swap /dev/md2 / /dev/md3 /home /dev/md4 /share
I'm not that familiar with tweaking swap and have only set it up in yast>partitioner before with no previous problems. This is my first raid setup so there may be an issue with that, but again, all others partitions are working fine. I tried editing swap in yast to format it again as /swap but it failed with an error code -3004.
Why are you mirroring swap? It offers no performance advantages, nor any significant data-protection advantages, unless the data being processed is both SUPER-valuable and very-ephemerial (such as data being collected and processed in real time from sensors in a non-repeatable or expensive-to-repeat experiment, or say, you're processing stock-market feeds, in which case 15 minute downtime = $100,000 fine, and significantly more for each additional 15 minutes of downtime.
Other than something like that, or life-and-death situations (in which case, you should be using QNX), mirroring swap is both a needless waste of disk space AND also hurts your system's performance for very very little benefit.
If you can, I would split that swap mirror into two separate swap partitions, and use both of them independently.
Ok, I understand I could split the swap mirror into two different un-mirrored swap partitions, but still am unclear about raid1. I understood that in a mirror setup both disks need to be exactly the same, or at least the partitions on them set up the same, to be mirrored. Are you saying that only certain partitions (or only one) can be mirrored, and other partitions not mirrored on the same disk? What happens when one disk fails, with one partition mirrored and another not mirrored? I was under the belief that would toast both disks. I remember reading a discussion about /boot being under raid1 or not, and that if it was not in raid1 and other partitions were, one drive would prevent the the second one being re-mirrored after a failure. Or at least that's what I thought I read. Sorry if my questions are confusing, but I am confused. Jim F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org