From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff Garzik Subject: Supporting Promise RAID5? Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 13:18:19 -0400 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <3F61FFDB.2010805@pobox.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org Cc: Arjan van de Ven , neilb@cse.unsw.edu.au List-Id: linux-raid.ids So, Promise is interested in working with the open source community to support their metadata formats. Their customers (and I) are pushing them to support "Linux RAID" (i.e. md), but they want to be able to support their existing customers as well. This email is basically a two part question: what's the best for 2.4? and 2.6? For 2.4, it's basically a dead end branch, IMO. Any 2.6 solution will likely be different. So my suggestion here is to use as much of md's raid5 logic as possible. Either share code -- where possible -- and copy code where not. The idea is to not reinvent a raid5 engine, and also leave 2.4 md alone as much as possible. For 2.6, there are several possibilities. Arjan (ataraid maintainer) has been pondering going through device mapper. In another email, NeilB pointed out to me that 2.6 md is well on its way to supporting pluggable metadata formats. I'm interested in input mainly on 2.6, but welcome suggestions for 2.4 as well. One key point that Arjan repeatedly points out to me is that md doesn't support partitions (in 2.4 at least, if not 2.6). Jeff