Greetings!
I have an old ultra10 with 2 ide disks. This is just a spare desktop
for browsing the web with no valuable data.
I want to have everything, and particularly /usr, on raid0 stripe.
This is: a. to speed up reads from disk and b. just for fun. I really
won't care if one disk dies taking all the data with it.
I will be installing the latest (11/06) solaris 10.
As solaris install doesn't allow / or /usr on raid0, this is what I
think. I'm pretty sure it will work, but still want to run it past
here in case someone spots a mistake:

1. install / on c0t0d0s1, /usr on c1t0d0s1
2. boot up, create striped metadisks from say, c0t0d0s3 and c1t0d0s3
for new / and s4 for the new /usr, bring up, newfs and mount the
metadisks
3. ufsdump/ufsrestore old / and /usr onto the new metadisks
4. installboot on the new / - both c0t0d03 and c1t0d03, update /etc/
vfstab
5. reboot into OBP, update boot-device to disk0:d (corresponding to
c0t0d0s3)
6. boot the OS, re-use the old / and /usr slices for something else.

Doable, isn't it?

noident@my-deja.com wrote:
> Greetings!
> I have an old ultra10 with 2 ide disks. This is just a spare desktop
> for browsing the web with no valuable data.
> I want to have everything, and particularly /usr, on raid0 stripe.
> This is: a. to speed up reads from disk and b. just for fun. I really
> won't care if one disk dies taking all the data with it.
> I will be installing the latest (11/06) solaris 10.
> As solaris install doesn't allow / or /usr on raid0, this is what I
> think. I'm pretty sure it will work, but still want to run it past
> here in case someone spots a mistake:
>
> 1. install / on c0t0d0s1, /usr on c1t0d0s1
> 2. boot up, create striped metadisks from say, c0t0d0s3 and c1t0d0s3
> for new / and s4 for the new /usr, bring up, newfs and mount the
> metadisks
> 3. ufsdump/ufsrestore old / and /usr onto the new metadisks
> 4. installboot on the new / - both c0t0d03 and c1t0d03, update /etc/
> vfstab
> 5. reboot into OBP, update boot-device to disk0:d (corresponding to
> c0t0d0s3)
> 6. boot the OS, re-use the old / and /usr slices for something else.
>
> Doable, isn't it?

Maybe, but not worth the trouble. You will not gain anything in speed
that you can notice. Go for Solaris Express (SXCE) found here:
http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd/

It's never a good thing to separate / and /usr, and especially not with
Solaris. Trust me, I've seen to many problems from this.

SXCE is so much more fun. But on the other hand, an Ultra 10 is so
outdated that you better dump it. Read this to see what I mean:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thre...0298&tstart=30

Happy hacking...

noident@my-deja.com schrieb:
> Greetings!
> I have an old ultra10 with 2 ide disks. This is just a spare desktop
> for browsing the web with no valuable data.
> I want to have everything, and particularly /usr, on raid0 stripe.
> This is: a. to speed up reads from disk and b. just for fun. I really
> won't care if one disk dies taking all the data with it.
> I will be installing the latest (11/06) solaris 10.
> As solaris install doesn't allow / or /usr on raid0, this is what I
> think. I'm pretty sure it will work, but still want to run it past
> here in case someone spots a mistake:
>
> 1. install / on c0t0d0s1, /usr on c1t0d0s1
> 2. boot up, create striped metadisks from say, c0t0d0s3 and c1t0d0s3
> for new / and s4 for the new /usr, bring up, newfs and mount the
> metadisks
> 3. ufsdump/ufsrestore old / and /usr onto the new metadisks
> 4. installboot on the new / - both c0t0d03 and c1t0d03, update /etc/
> vfstab
> 5. reboot into OBP, update boot-device to disk0:d (corresponding to
> c0t0d0s3)
> 6. boot the OS, re-use the old / and /usr slices for something else.
>
> Doable, isn't it?
>

I haven't tried it, but I doubt it. You cannot expect c0t0d0s3 to be
mountable if you newfs'd it as part of a stripe, and this is what is
needed during booting, as far as I understand this process.

Why do you want stripes for / and /usr anyway. You won't benefit at all,
because / and /usr are 99.9% of the time only read from. So you will
gain the same performance benefit with a mirror, and this configuration
is fully supported.

Just a thought.

-Thomas

On 2007-04-20 07:13:37 +0100, noident@my-deja.com said:
> is just a spare desktop
> for browsing the web with no valuable data.
> I want to have everything, and particularly /usr, on raid0 stripe.
> This is: a. to speed up reads from disk and b. just for fun. I really
> won't care if one disk dies taking all the data with it.

This doesn't work. There are things which need to be able to read the
root filesystem (the boot block and ufsboot) before the SVM kernel
modules are present (and before the kernel is present) and which will
fail dismally if it's not UFS filesystem sitting on a disk slice. The
only options for / (and probably for /usr) are a filesystem sitting on
a slice, or a mirror of two such.

(Obviously this will change somewhat when ZFS booting happens, though I
imagine there will still be restrictions.)

--tim

Thanks to everyone who replied.
Definitely won't work.
Even though I still think it will pass the bootblock (I'm almost sure
it's outside the filesystem on sectors 0-15), but it will never pass
the ufsboot stage, and then ufsboot won't be able to find the kernel
itself...
Striping /usr still might work though...
Thanks heaps.

noident@my-deja.com wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who replied.
> Definitely won't work.
> Even though I still think it will pass the bootblock (I'm almost sure
> it's outside the filesystem on sectors 0-15), but it will never pass
> the ufsboot stage, and then ufsboot won't be able to find the kernel
> itself...
> Striping /usr still might work though...

Don't stripe, mirror. If space isn't an issue, you will get the same
potential performance gains. Don't split out /usr either.

--
Ian Collins.

Ian Collins wrote:
> noident@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Thanks to everyone who replied.
>> Definitely won't work.
>> Even though I still think it will pass the bootblock (I'm almost sure
>> it's outside the filesystem on sectors 0-15), but it will never pass
>> the ufsboot stage, and then ufsboot won't be able to find the kernel
>> itself...
>> Striping /usr still might work though...
>
> Don't stripe, mirror. If space isn't an issue, you will get the same
> potential performance gains.

On reads yes, but not on writes... But there will be no difference on
OP's A22 (U10)...

> Don't split out /usr either.

So true.

Thommy M. Malmström wrote:
> Ian Collins wrote:
>
>> noident@my-deja.com wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks to everyone who replied.
>>> Definitely won't work.
>>> Even though I still think it will pass the bootblock (I'm almost sure
>>> it's outside the filesystem on sectors 0-15), but it will never pass
>>> the ufsboot stage, and then ufsboot won't be able to find the kernel
>>> itself...
>>> Striping /usr still might work though...
>>
>>
>> Don't stripe, mirror. If space isn't an issue, you will get the same
>> potential performance gains.
>
>
> On reads yes, but not on writes... But there will be no difference on
> OP's A22 (U10)...
>
True, but how often is the root filesystem written?

--
Ian Collins.

I'm inclined now to mirror / and /usr and stripe /export/home - as
this is where the browser cache is written.
And of course, have swap slices on both disks.

Ian Collins wrote:
> Thommy M. Malmström wrote:
>> Ian Collins wrote:
>>
>>> noident@my-deja.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> Thanks to everyone who replied.
>>>> Definitely won't work.
>>>> Even though I still think it will pass the bootblock (I'm almost sure
>>>> it's outside the filesystem on sectors 0-15), but it will never pass
>>>> the ufsboot stage, and then ufsboot won't be able to find the kernel
>>>> itself...
>>>> Striping /usr still might work though...
>>>
>>> Don't stripe, mirror. If space isn't an issue, you will get the same
>>> potential performance gains.
>>
>> On reads yes, but not on writes... But there will be no difference on
>> OP's A22 (U10)...
>>
> True, but how often is the root filesystem written?

Well, logs if /var is in there, and mails, print spools, and... But in
OP's case: Almost never.