Re: Driver for BIOS-based software RAIDs

[Lars Marowsky-Bree <lmb@suse.de>]

On 2003-10-13T22:38:40,
   Thomas Horsten <thomas@horsten.com> said:

> Having said that, BIOS RAID does solve a few problems inherent to software 
> RAID's, particularly the boot process

The boot process is a real problem. It can be partly solved in the
bootloader - iff the BIOS is smart enough to try all disks until it can
read one copy -, but yes, BIOS RAID does have some advantage here. This
is pre-kernel stage though and so beyond this driver anyway.

After the kernel is up and running, we can handle that just fine.

> and consistency of RAID's between operating systems.

That's fortunately a problem I don't have to care about ;-)

> > Windows doesn't use the BIOS to access the device at all; the
> > corresponding hardware drivers emulate that.
> I know, but the BIOS supports its boot up to 32-bit mode. Which means you 
> could see the drive from DOS, etc.

Well, for the boot loader stage it does have some advantage as I said.

But beyond that it doesn't matter and is bypassed.


Sincerely,
    Lars Marowsky-Brée <lmb@suse.de>

-- 
High Availability & Clustering		ever tried. ever failed. no matter.
SuSE Labs				try again. fail again. fail better.
Research & Development, SUSE LINUX AG		-- Samuel Beckett

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