For my work I store a huge amount of data in my systems, starting with a number of customers’ systems’ backups, which take the best part of 1TB of storage to preserve for the usual year or two that I usually store them (customers are very happy that way). This unfortunately means that even the 5TB of space present in Yamato is quite restrictive for my business. It’s for this reason, and others, that I ordered the components to build myself a 12TB storage server.
For said server I decided to go with an AMD Fusion board, by Sapphire, both because I’ve been disappointed by Intel’s Atom (and nVidia’s ION), and because the price was right for a board with 5 SATA ports and an eSATA one — four 3TB Western Digital Caviar Green disks, one Kingston SSD that I still had laying around, plus a WD MyBook Studio II that is currently connected to Yamato. In particular, for those asking, the fact that most of the “high end” Atoms – such as the D510 I have on my frontend – do not support CPU speed throttling is appalling; the AMD Fusion board I have do not have said problem.
Anyway, the board itself looks good and works fine — and it was curious for me to notice that it uses UEFI 2.1, rather than BIOS, as its firmware.. it’s the first desktop-class board I found with such a setup (admittedly I haven’t bought many, lately). Also, while the IOMMU feature is disabled by default, the help text for it in the configuration pages states that it is useful to translate I/O operations under Linux.. yes it explicitly mentions Linux in the help text! Kudos to them!
Out of experience with Yamato, when you have so many disks with a complex situation (RAID1 and LVM), booting can be troublesome; in Yamato’s case a bit more, as the order the disks are listed on depends among other things by the order in which they are detected by the kernel, which can change between version and version since the box uses three different controllers and three different drivers. For this reason I was hoping to use UEFI-style booting through grub2 rather than the classic old BIOS boot…
Turns out it wasn’t that good an idea; even with scarabeus’s guide, I was unable to get it to work; it seems like to set it up properly you need to boot an EFI-capable kernel (which is not the one in SysRescueCD, that I usually use to install my systems), and boot it EFI-style. If you were to boot it without EFI support, you wouldn’t be able to find the EFI variables in the /sys hierarchy anyway. I ended up discarding the whole idea of that, since at the end grub2 can make sense of the RAID devices and can find my rootfs just fine.
But there is one thing to note here that is quite important. When I configured my kernel for the first time, I enabled EFI support; then I enabled the hardened features (GRSec and Pax)… and then when I booted it the first time I went to look for the EFI variables without finding them — I didn’t yet understand that booting via PC BIOS wouldn’t have shown them anyway! Turns out that the KERNEXEC option that is so troublesome with virtualisation … is also incompatible with EFI. If you enable that option (which both the server and workstation configurations in hardened-sources enable), the EFI support in the kernel is entirely shut off.
So it appears using EFI is still too soon: we lack tools stable enough, to begin with, and documentation (I had to rely on ArchLinux’s documentation for the most part, but even that is not very clear and refers to black magic tricks; I refrain on writing documentation on the topic myself because I don’t understand all of it at all, even after reading Matthew Garret’s posts on the topic). And it seems to require the kernel to perform unsafe operations (RWX mappings), which is definitely not a good thing.
I start to understand Matthew’s feelings in regard of EFI: it might end up with a more normal boot process once the transition is complete, but between limitations with backward compatibility and no real good feature that is missing – with exception of nvram support – it doesn’t look like it’s something we should be paying much attention to, for now.