Re: Driver for BIOS-based software RAIDs

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

On 2003-10-13T20:25:30,
   Thomas Horsten <thomas@horsten.com> said:

> The problem is that the block device thus assembled won't have support for 
> multiple partitions, for two reasons: the MD driver doesn't align the minor 
> to any offset, and it doesn't allocate multiple minors for a RAID so we can 
> call register_disk to parse the partition table and create the logical 
> partition devices. Both of these are defaults, and it might be possible to 
> tweak.

You probably could change that easily enough.

> Well due to the nature of BIOS RAID's, the user is likely to expect
> that it will be detected and handled automatically without the need
> for a separate setup (since the machine creates the logical device for
> them, and this works in other OS's that use the BIOS to access the
> drive).

"BIOS RAIDs" is a rather sweet euphemism for "crippled pretense of
hardware RAID, which is in fact emulated by software". I've got no
problem with telling the users that what they have _is_ software RAID
and needs to be treated as such.

Windows doesn't use the BIOS to access the device at all; the
corresponding hardware drivers emulate that.


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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