Re: [PATCH] imsm: Forbid spanning between multiple controllers.

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

On 15/01/2013 14:57, Phillip Susi wrote:
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> On 1/15/2013 5:31 AM, Patelczyk, Maciej wrote:
>> Hi Phillip,
>>
>> Mdadm does not care about the controller unless you created IMSM
>> based RAID. Basically you can create that type of RAID *only* on
>> Intel based platforms with OROM enabled. It's Intel solution, we
>> support it and we maintain it. It's very specific type of metadata.
[...]
>
> Warnings about potentially troublesome situations are good, but
> outright refusal is not.  Yes, I realize it would be a problem for
> Windows due to the poor way the driver has to be implemented ( why
> can't the OROM see other disks on other controllers? ), but sometimes
> you don't care about that.  For instance, if you are setting up the
> array on one machine where you can not connect all of the drives to
> the same controller ( and do not care about booting from the array on
> this machine ), but you are planning on moving them to a machine where
> they will be.  This is just one example of many situations where you
> need to be able to say "I know what I'm doing, go ahead anyway".

Isn't there, or wasn't there, an environment variable for mdadm called 
something like IMSM_PLATFORM_IGNORE for precisely this scenario? Is that 
what this patch series disabled?

Cheers,

John.