Re: Linux mdadm superblock question.

[John Robinson <john.robinson@anonymous.org.uk>]

On 16/02/2010 03:18, david@lang.hm wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Feb 2010, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
>> On 02/15/2010 04:27 PM, Neil Brown wrote:
>>
>> There are three options:
>>
>> a) either don't boot from it (separate /boot);
>> b) use a bootloader which installs in the MBR and
>> hopefully-unpartitioned disk areas (e.g. Grub);
>> c) use a nonstandard custom MBR.
>>
>> Neither (b) or (c), of course, allow for chainloading from another OS
>> install and thus are bad for interoperability.
> 
> I have had no problems with XFS partitions and lilo as the bootloader. 
> I've been doing this for a couple of years now without realizing that 
> there is supposed to be a problem.

There isn't, if you use partitions. It could (would) go wrong if you 
tried to put an XFS filesystem, or md RAID with a v1.1 superblock, on a 
whole disc without a partition table *and* you tried to put a bootloader 
on. I can't say it's ever occurred to me to do that, because I always 
assumed that whatever I put in a partition used all of it, and I 
couldn't expect to double-book the beginning of it and have it work.

Cheers,

John.