To simplify creation and management of test configurations the
dragon and x4550 configureis have been integrated with udev. Our
current best guess as to how we'll actually manage the disks in
these systems is with a udev mapping scheme. The current leading
scheme is to map each drive to a simpe <CHANNEL><RANK> id. In
this mapping each CHANNEL is represented by the letters a-z, and
the RANK is represented by the numbers 1-n. A CHANNEL should
identify a group of RANKS which are all attached to a single
controller, each RANK represents a disk. This provides a nice
mechanism to locate a specific drive given a known hardware
configuration. Various hardware vendors use a similar scheme.
A nice side effect of these changes is it allowed me to make
the raid0/raid10/raidz/raidz2 setup functions generic. This
makes adding new test configs easy, you just need to create
a udev rules file for your test config which conforms to the
naming scheme.
Brian Behlendorf