Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
Dan Gahlinger wrote: > I have a question which perhaps many people might have, > > Is there any performance or reliability difference between using the > "add-on" drbd source download > > or using the "built-in" kernel modules in Suse such as > "kmp-bigsmp" and so forth? > Other than being, perhaps, architecture-specific, I honestly don't think you'd get much performance out of it. Most of the performance issues are relative to the underlying hardware - harddrive read/write speed vs. network bandwidth. > I noticed in Suse 10.2 they not only include the RPM of DRBD, > but they also include two other packages which are NOT included if you > just use the source. they are "kmp-default" and "kmp-bigsmp" (there is > a third, but I don't use it, it is "kmp-xen"). > I am also running OpenSuse 10.2 with DRBD as fileservers, but I installed the pre-compiled modules as opposed to doing the source myself. It was much easier, and quicker, to set up. > I was just wondering about reliability or stability differences > between them? > I'm thinking the built-in would be preferable. Why? because it got me > to thinking about booting. > > When the system boots, one of the first things it does is mount the > filesystems (fstab), > but the drbd volume is an EVMS which means it needs drbd running in > order to mount it. > But it seems to become a catch-22. > > You can't mount the volume without drbd running, and you cant run the > drbd "service' (add-on) without mounting the filesystem. Which is > where the kernel modules, and specialized kernels come in, they'd get > loaded with the kernel. > You could try mounting these via boot.local instead of fstab so you can do any last-minute autoprepping before the system is up and running, which includes starting servers that might use the facilities after they've been made available. > part two is - as a "built-in" it's part of the kernel, specially > compiled, which means its a bit "lower level" than just a service. > > or am I completely off-track here? I'm not quite sure what you mean by a 'lower level' than just a service - whether or not you compile a module outside of the distribution vs. using one provided for you as somewhat irrelevant, no??? This is the beauty of tracks - if you get off of one of them, you can easily jump on another... ^_^