DM(4)							   BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual 						     DM(4)

NAME

     dm -- Device-mapper disk driver

SYNOPSIS

     pseudo-device dm

DESCRIPTION

     The dm driver provides the capability of creating one or more virtual disks based on the target mapping.

     This document assumes that you're familiar with how to generate kernels, how to properly configure disks and pseudo-devices in a kernel con-
     figuration file, and how to partition disks.  This driver is used by the Linux lvm2tools to create and manage lvm in NetBSD.

     Currently, the linear, zero, and error targets are implemented.  Each component partition should be offset at least 2 sectors from the begin-
     ning of the component disk.  This avoids potential conflicts between the component disk's disklabel and dm's disklabel.  In i386 it is offset
     by 65 sectors, where 63 sectors are the initial boot sectors and 2 sectors are used for the disklabel which is set to be read-only.

     In order to compile in support for dm, you must add a line similar to the following to your kernel configuration file:

	   pseudo-device  dm	#device-mapper disk device

     dm may create linear mapped devices, zero, and error block devices.  Zero and error block devices are used mostly for testing.  Linear
     devices are used to create virtual disks with linearly mapped virtual blocks to blocks on real disk.  dm Device-mapper devices are controlled
     through the /dev/mapper/control device.  For controlling this device ioctl(2) calls are used.  For the implementation of the communication
     channel, the proplib(3) library is used.  The protocol channel is defined as a proplib dictionary with needed values.  For more details, look
     at sys/dev/dm/netbsd-dm.h.  Before any device can be used, every device-mapper disk device must be initialized.  For initialization one line
     must be passed to the kernel driver in the form of a proplib dictionary.  Every device can have more than one table active.  An example for
     such a line is:

	   0 10240 linear /dev/wd1a 384

     dm The first parameter is the start sector for the table defined with this line, the second is the length in sectors which is described with
     this table.  The third parameter is the target name.  All other parts of this line depend on the chosen target.  dm For the linear target,
     there are two additional parameters: The first parameter describes the disk device to which the device-mapper disk is mapped.  The second
     parameter is the offset on this disk from the start of the disk/partition.

SEE ALSO

     config(1), proplib(3), MAKEDEV(8), dmsetup(8), fsck(8), lvm(8), mount(8), newfs(8)

HISTORY

     The device-mapper disk driver first appeared in NetBSD 6.0.

AUTHORS

     Adam Hamsik <haad@NetBSD.org> implemented the device-mapper driver for NetBSD.

     Brett Lymn <blymn@NetBSD.org>,
     Reinoud Zandijk <reinoud@NetBSD.org>, and
     Bill Stouder-Studenmund <wrstuden@NetBSD.org> provided guidance and answered questions about the NetBSD implementation.

BUGS

     This driver is still work-in-progress--there can be bugs.

BSD
								  August 30, 2008							       BSD