Re: [mdadm git pull] "--assemble --scan" support for imsm

[Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>]

On Sunday November 2, dan.j.williams@intel.com wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 20:42 -0700, Neil Brown wrote:
> > To fit the assembly of a specific member of a container into this
> > model, we need to have the 'container' in the list of available
> > devices.
> > If the identity specifies 'container=whatever' then we clearly select
> > all devices which match that.  You would expect at exactly one - the
> > container.  You would then need to call ->container_content on that
> > container and find the correct member array which matches the
> > 'member=' specifier (or any other specifier there might be?)
> > 
> > Exactly how updates and "--force" are passed though would need to be
> > sorted out.
> > Then the devices in the selected array from ->container_content could
> > be passed to sysfs_add_disk and the array started.
> > 
> > Auto-assembly would discover that the first unused-so-far device was a
> > container, and would need to load the list of arrays and assemble the
> > first one that was not yet assembled.
> > 
> 
> I had a go at this, and the result is pushed out to my scratch-devel
> branch.

Thanks.  I took your code, kept some bits, fixed some bits, rewrote
other bits and completely replaced some more :-)  And added some of my
code too.

I've just pushed the result to my devel-3.0 branch

  git pull git://neil.brown.name/mdadm devel-3.0

It get a clean "make everything" and the self tests all run (I hope -
it's late and I cannot wait for the final run).

Tomorrow I'm going to hack at the man page, and write some more test
scripts.

With the current code

  mdadm -As

should find and assemble all of your arrays.  And give fairly useful
names.

I haven't included your

   Let symlinks to standard devices count as standard names

patch because I don't think I agree with it, and I don't think it is
needed any more.

I also have left out your

     imsm: match_home(), document why it is stubbed out
    
because I don't understand.  Maybe some more words about how
'family_num' can distinguish between "Local" and "Foreign". ??

Thanks heaps,

NeilBrown