NAME
dm
—
Device-mapper disk driver
SYNOPSIS
device dm
DESCRIPTION
Thedm
driver provides the capability of creating one or
more virtual disks based on the target mapping.
This document assumes that you're familiar with how to generate kernels, how to properly configure disks and devices in a kernel configuration file, and how to partition disks. This driver is used by the Linux lvm2tools to create and manage lvm in DragonFly.
Currently, the linear,
zero, error,
crypt, and stripe targets
are implemented. In order to compile in support for
dm
, you must add a line similar to the following to
your kernel configuration file:
device dm #device-mapper disk device
dm
may create linear mapped devices, zero,
and error block devices. Zero and error block devices are used mostly for
testing. Linear devices are used to create virtual
disks with linearly mapped virtual blocks to blocks on real disk.
dm
Device-mapper devices are controlled through the
/dev/mapper/control device. For controlling this
device ioctl(2) calls are used. For the implementation of the
communication channel, the
proplib(3) library is used. The protocol channel is defined as a
proplib dictionary with needed values. For more details, look at
sys/dev/disk/dm/netbsd-dm.h. Before any device can
be used, every device-mapper disk device must be initialized. For
initialization one line must be passed to the kernel driver in the form of a
proplib dictionary. Every device can have more than one table active. An
example for such a line is:
0 10240 linear /dev/da0s1a 384
dm
The first parameter is the start sector
for the table defined with this line, the second is the length in sectors
which is described with this table. The third parameter is the target name.
All other parts of this line depend on the chosen target.
dm
For the linear target, there are two additional
parameters: The first parameter describes the disk device to which the
device-mapper disk is mapped. The second parameter is the offset on this
disk from the start of the disk/partition.
SEE ALSO
proplib(3), config(8), dmsetup(8), fsck(8), lvm(8), mount(8), newfs(8)
HISTORY
The device-mapper disk driver first appeared in NetBSD 6.0.
It was then brought into DragonFly 2.7 by Alex Hornung.
AUTHORS
Adam Hamsik
<haad@NetBSD.org>
implemented the dm
driver for
NetBSD.
Brett Blymn <blymn@NetBSD.org>, Reinoud Zandijk <reinoud@NetBSD.org>, and Bill Stouder-Studenmund <wrstuden@NetBSD.org> provided guidance and answered questions about the NetBSD implementation.
BUGS
This driver is still work-in-progress—there can be bugs.