In the Steps of Thomas Alva

My first foray into experimentation with RAIDframe on OpenBSD has met with failure.

I'm not disenchanted, because there is no significant need in my life for a working RAID device, and I am comforted by the fact that the lightbulb wasn't invented in a day, either.

To wit:

• The online documentation for using the RAIDframe driver with OpenBSD is very poor, and the best guides are amateurish howtos replete with typographical errors.
  
  
• These howtos are often misleading or just plain wrong. This stems partly out of ignorance of the dark art of RAID and partly because the howtos are painfully outdated. OpenBSD 3.0 was released a looong time ago, kids.
  
  
• RAIDframe does support using a RAID device as the root (/) partition by means of the RAID_AUTOCONFIG kernel option and the "raidctl -A" flag, but with the huge fucking caveat that "the kernel being booted must currently reside on a non-RAID set".
  
  
• The kicker: the RAIDframe device driver is not supported in the GENERIC OpenBSD kernel, meaning if you want to use RAIDframe, you need to install OpenBSD, download/untar the source tree, compile your own kernel, install it, and reboot from it. By comparison, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports RAID as part of the install. You just have to jump through a completely different set of hoops.