Re: Proposed Enhancements to MD

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

On 2004-01-13T11:03:40,
   Scott Long <scott_long@adaptec.com> said:

> The biggest issue here is that a real fdisk table needs to exist on the
> array in order for our BIOS to recognise it as a boot device.

Hm, ok.

> >Yes. Is anything missing from the 2.6 & hotplug & udev solution which
> >you require?
> 
> I'll admit that I'm not as familiar with 2.6 as I should be.  Does a
> disk arrival mechanism already exist?

Yes. hotplug already will get you events when new disks arrive.

> >In particular, I'm wondering whether partitions using the new activity
> >logging features of md will still be bootable, or whether the boot
> >partitions need to be 'md classic'.
> 
> Our products will only recognise and boot off of DDF arrays.  They have
> no concept of classic MD metadata.

OK. The question was meant differently. In 2.6, we have the ability to
log resyncs and journal updates (see the discussions on linux-raid). I
was just wondering whether DDF would allow this, or whether it is a
simple minded "this disk good, that disk bad", and thus the boot drive
might not be able to use the new md features with the DDF metadata.

> This work was originally started on 2.4.  With the closing of 2.4 and
> release of 2.6, we are porting are work forward.  It would be nice to
> integrate the changes into 2.4 also, but we recognise the need for 2.4
> to remain as stable as possible.

2.4 is dead and shouldn't see new features.


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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