Re: MD array keeps resyncing after rebooting

[Martin Wilck <mwilck@arcor.de>]

Hi Francis,

> On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 8:19 PM, Martin Wilck <mwilck@arcor.de> wrote:
>> On 08/02/2013 02:46 PM, Francis Moreau wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> # mdadm -E /dev/sda | egrep "state"
>>>>         state[0] : Optimal, Consistent
>>>>    init state[0] : Fully Initialised
>>
>> This would correspond to "00 02", and it's what we should see after
>> initialization. On my system the BIOS sets "00 01" (Optimal, consistent,
>> Quick Init in progress) when it first creates an array, because the BIOS
>> doesn't do a full initialization. But "not initialized" is weird. The
>> mdadm DDF code won't set this by itself, AFAIK. Please make sure again
>> that the "before" data matches what mdadm/mdmon wrote just after
>> stopping during shutdown.
> 
> I did it again and got the same result: both disks have:
> 
> 00000860  00 00 ff ff ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
> 
> and I checked again that "mdadm -E" reported an initialized state.
> 
> Moreover this time I did a "sync" before dumping the ddf headers.
> 
> So I'm quite lost, I can see only 2 cases:
> 
>   - with my HW setup some metadata are not written to disks by the
> kernel but stood somewhere in RAM (cache)
> 
>   - the state is not stored at address 00000860 (very unlikely)
> 
>   - the dumps are incorrect
> 
> How can I debug this more ?
> 
> Thanks for your help.

have you got any further insight? I have LSI DDF fake RAID with mdadm
running on my system right now, and it seems to work nicely; no problems
over reboots.

You may want to retry with my latest patch set. In particular, "DDF:
container_content_ddf: set safe_mode_delay > 0" might help.

Martin