BIOCTL(8) AerieBSD 1.0 Refernce Manual BIOCTL(8)

NAME

bioctl — RAID management interface

SYNOPSIS

bioctl .Bk -words [-dhiqv] [-a alarm-function] [-b channel:target[.lun]] [-C flag[,flag,...]] [-c raidlevel] [-H channel:target[.lun]] [-l special[,special,...]] [-r rounds] [-u channel:target[.lun]] device .Ek

DESCRIPTION

RAID device drivers which support management functionality can register their services with the bio(4) driver. bioctl then can be used to maintain RAID volumes.

The options are as follows:
-a alarm-function
Control the RAID card's alarm functionality, if supported. alarm-function may be one of:

disable
Disable the alarm on the RAID controller.
enable
Enable the alarm on the RAID controller.
get
Retrieve the current alarm state (enabled or disabled).
silence| quiet
Silence the alarm if it is currently beeping.

The alarm-function may be specified as given above, or by the first letter only (e.g. -a e).
-b channel:target[.lun]
Instruct the device at channel:target[.lun] to start blinking, if there is ses(4) or safte(4) support in the enclosure.
-C flag[,flag,...]
Pass flags when doing operations with bioctl. May be one of:

force
Force the operation, e.g. to force creation of volumes with unclean data in the metatdata areas.
noauto
Ignore this RAID volume upon reboot.
-c raidlevel
Create a softraid(4) device of level raidlevel. The device must begin with “softraid” followed by a number.

Valid raidlevels are:

0
RAID 0: A striping discipline.
1
RAID 1: A mirroring discipline.
C
CRYPTO: An encrypting discipline.
-d
Delete volume specified by device.
-H channel:target[.lun]
If the device at channel:target[.lun] is currently marked “Unused”, promote it to being a “Hot Spare”.
-h
Where necessary, produce "human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to four or less.
-i
Enumerate the selected RAID devices.
-l special[,special,...]
Use special device list to create within the softraid(4) framework. Requires -c.
-q
Show vendor, product, revision, and serial number for the given disk.
-r rounds
When creating an encrypted volume, specifies the number of iterations of the algorithm used to convert a passphrase into a key. Higher iteration counts take more time, but offer more resistance to key guessing attacks. The minimum is 1000 rounds and the default is 8192.
-u channel:target[.lun]
Instruct the device at channel:target[.lun] to cease blinking, if there is ses(4) or safte(4) support in the enclosure.
-v
Be more verbose in output.
device
Select a drive by name (e.g. sd0) or a RAID controller by name (e.g. ami0). For operations which will be performed against ses(4) or safte(4) enclosures, it is also possible to directly specify the enclosure name (e.g. safte0).

EXAMPLES

The following command, executed from the command line, would configure the device softraid0 with 4 special devices (/dev/sd2e, /dev/sd3e, /dev/sd4e, /dev/sd5e) and a raid level of 1: 

# bioctl -c 1 -l /dev/sd2e,/dev/sd3e,/dev/sd4e,/dev/sd5e softraid0

The following command, executed from the command line, would configure the device softraid0 with one special device (/dev/sd2e) and an encrypting volume: 

# bioctl -c C -l /dev/sd2e softraid0

bioctl will ask for a passphrase, that will be needed to unlock the encrypted disk. After creating a new encrypted disk, it should be zeroed with the following command (assuming the new disk is sd3): 

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd3c

SEE ALSO

ami(4), arc(4), bio(4), ciss(4), mfi(4), safte(4), scsi(4), ses(4), softraid(4)

HISTORY

The bioctl command first appeared in OpenBSD 3.8.

AUTHORS

The bioctl interface was written by Marco Peereboom ‹marco@openbsd.org›.

CAVEATS

Use of the crypto discipline is currently considered experimental.

AerieBSD 1.0 Reference Manual December 26 2008 BIOCTL(8)