2009-03-24
Using fully mirrored system disks on Linux
I'm on record as building systems that use
mirrored system disks with plain /boot and swap partitions (that is,
non mirrored, just duplicated), mostly through ancient caution.
You know what? I was wrong. Totally wrong. I've now built a system with
a fully mirrored system disk and not only does it work, it works better
than my old way. I will henceforth now mirror /boot and swap, in
addition to all of the regular filesystems, on all future systems that I
build with mirrored system disks.
With /boot, mirroring keeps things in sync automatically, and it
means that the system will come up without manual intervention when
there's only one disk. With a /boot and a /boot2, not only do
you have to keep them in sync by hand (in practice we don't), but
if a disk fails the system will pause in boot because one of your
filesystems isn't there and you have to fix it by hand.
With swap, you probably don't need that much swap, it works, and while init scripts seem to be much more tolerant of missing swap areas than missing filesystems I don't see any reason to take chances if I don't have to. And 'mirror everything' is a very simple rule to keep straight.
(I don't have any idea of the performance tradeoffs of mirrored swap versus non-mirrored swap, but my view these days is that if you are worried about the performance characteristics of your swap space, something horrible has gone wrong to start with.)
How not to improve your CD player application
This is one of the rare entries that I have to present in pictorial form.
Here is a 65% size view of what kscd, the KDE CD playing program,
looks like in Fedora 8 (where it is version 1.6, from KDE 3.5.10):
Here is what it looks like in Fedora 10, again 65% size:
(Links to full sized versions are here and here. Note that the Fedora 10 version is a shaped window; the black areas are normally transparent.)
One of these two applications is useful. The other one has been
'improved', presumably because people thought that the first one looked
kind of boring (also, apparently, people wanted to be able to give the
CD player 'skins'; there are several supplied with Fedora 10's kscd,
all of them equally bad). In the process it has been made less useful
and even less functional (they are playing the same CD, but only the
older one displays the artist correctly).
Apparently I now need a new CD player program, just like last
time. Which is a real shame, because kscd was
a nice CD player once it started working reliably in Fedora 8.
(Alternately I need to figure out how to build the Fedora 8 version
of kscd on Fedora 10. Hopefully the KDE libraries are compatible
enough.)