Sandy Drobic wrote:
On modern systems the cpu load is no longer an argument, even if you were to use software RAID5. The real argument is ease of use: software raid cannot include /boot, so you have to provide redundancy for /boot in some other way.
Hmmm. Sandy, I don't know if that is true anymore. The last 3 software raid systems I set up, using Yast, everything except swap was included in the raid array. That included / /boot and /home. I agree that you are only using one disk to "boot" from with grub using: title openSUSE 10.3 - 2.6.23.17-ccj64 root (hd0,4) However, hd0 is mapped to the raid array where: [22:40 nirvana/boot] # cat grub/device.map (hd0) /dev/mapper/nvidia_hacfgfda So I am booting from the 5th partition (or the pc slice number in the BSD terminology) where "4" the partition is counted from "0". hd0 is the software raid array built from /dev/sda and /dev/sdb in raid1: 22:28 nirvana~> sudo dmraid -r /dev/sda: nvidia, "nvidia_hacfgfda", mirror, ok, 976773166 sectors, data@ 0 /dev/sdb: nvidia, "nvidia_hacfgfda", mirror, ok, 976773166 sectors, data@ 0 with partitions: 22:18 nirvana~> cat /etc/fstab /dev/mapper/nvidia_hacfgfda_part7 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1 /dev/mapper/nvidia_hacfgfda_part5 /boot ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2 /dev/mapper/nvidia_hacfgfda_part8 /home ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2 /dev/mapper/nvidia_hacfgfda_part6 swap swap defaults 0 0 So in my case, the system is booting off from (hd0,4) or the 5th partition on the raid array with is /boot which is mirrored between /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. I don't know whether grub has internal logic to select an individual disk to boot from, but I believe that the physical disk boot selection is governed by the BIOS selection of hard disk boot priority. So it appears that /boot is mirrored and also used to boot as well. -- David C. Rankin, J.D., P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org