system freeze on "slice too large"

[Chris Turner]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
    When I try to do 'vinum start' vinum blows up my system.  Literally
    blows it up.  It is clearly leaving memory structures associated
    with the kernel that it has freed.  vinum is such a huge mess I just
    don't have any idea where the problem is occuring, but I think it
    may be related to how vinum tries to scan available disk media.
    So far the only 'slice too large' errors I've gotten occur when I
    try to do 'vinum start'.  I think it is related to vinum's insistance
    on rolling its own everything.  It constructs device numbers right out
    of the blue and then tries to use them.
					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>
Did some more investigating and it looks like the 'vinum start' 
essentially calls 'vinum read' after a devstat(3) iteration to find 
'suitable devices', which based on a quick test program appear to be the 
actual disk devices (e.g. adN / sdN, etc). The difference seems to be 
that 'vinum read' with no arguments seems to probe things differently 
than 'vinum read' without arguments .. so I'll keep digging.. Perhaps a 
short term fix related to this might 'hold things' for the time being 
until the 'direct partition' scan you mention can be implemented.

also, there is some kgetenv related to vinum.disks checked during the 
load, so perhaps what you'd mentioned in the other thread about adding 
this for boot-time isn't needed  .. ? Haven't tested yet / not sure if 
this was from your earlier patch or not - I still need to dig further.. 
will be attempting to do so over the next few days, hopefully.