Using block device as cnfs buffer under FreeBSD.

Bill Davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Tue Mar 6 23:11:02 UTC 2007


newsmaster at alkar.net wrote:
> Hello,
>
> FreeBSD 6.2, inn-2.4.3, compiled with large files support.
>
> Can I use block device (drive) directly as cnfs buffer? As far as I see, no.
>
> In errlog:
>
> innd: SERVER cant initalize storage manager: one or more storage methods failed initialization
>
> And that's it. How can I see more debug information to be sure that problem is in FreeBSD? It works with files, but does not with block devices (ad3, ad3s1 were tried, chown news:news was also made on them). FreeBSD supports mmap(), but I don't know about block devices.
>   
I am not enough expert in BSD (particularly all the flavors) to know if 
mmap(slice) works, but there should be other error messages. You might 
just turn of mmap in the config and use file i/o for everything, to see 
that works or you have other problems.

I would not guess if i/o using file calls on raw devices would be faster 
or slower than inode overhead.
> Is there any disadvantage using one (or several) big file instead of direct drive device?
>
> Thank you for answers.
>
>
>   


-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979



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