ANNOUNCE: mdadm 1.9.0 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux

ANNOUNCE: mdadm 1.9.0 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux

[Neil Brown]

I am pleased to announce the availability of 
   mdadm version 1.9.0
It is available at
   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/
and
   http://www.{countrycode}.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/

as a source tar-ball and (at the first site) as an SRPM, and as an RPM for i386.

mdadm is a tool for creating, managing and monitoring
device arrays using the "md" driver in Linux, also
known as Software RAID arrays.

Release 1.9.0 adds:
    -   Fix rpm build problem (stray %)
    -   Minor manpage updates
    -   Change "dirty" status to "active" as it was confusing people.
    -   --assemble --auto recognises 'standard' name and insists on using
        the appropriate major/minor number for them.
    -   Remove underscore from partition names, so partitions of 
	"foo" are "foo1", "foo2" etc (unchanged) and partitions of
	"f00" are "f00p1", "f00p2" etc rather than "f00_p1"...
    -   Use "major", "minor", "makedev" macros instead of 
	"MAJOR", "MINOR", "MKDEV" so that large device numbers work
	on 2.6 (providing you have glibc 2.3.3 or later).
    -   Add some missing closes of open file descriptors.
    -   Reread /proc/partition for every array assembled when using
	it to find devices, rather than only once.
    -   Make "mdadm -Ss" stop stacked devices properly, by reversing the
	order in which arrays are stopped.
    -   Improve some error messages.
    -   Allow device name to appear before first option, so e.g.
	mdadm /dev/md0 -A /dev/sd[ab]
	works.
    -   Assume '-Q' if just a device is given, rather than being silent.

This is based on 1.8.0 and *not* on 1.8.1 which was meant to be a pre-release 
for the upcoming 2.0.0.  The next prerelease will have a more obvious name.

Development of mdadm is sponsored by CSE@UNSW: 
  The School of Computer Science and Engineering
at
  The University of New South Wales

NeilBrown  04 February 2005

Re: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 1.9.0 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux

[Max Waterman]

Neil Brown wrote:
>
> Release 1.9.0 adds:
...
>     -   --assemble --auto recognises 'standard' name and insists on using
>         the appropriate major/minor number for them.

Is this the problem I encountered when I added auto=md to my mdadm.conf 
file?

It caused all sorts of problems - which were recoverable, fortunately.

I ended up putting a '/sbin/MAKEDEV md' into /etc/rc.sysinit just before 
the call to mdadm, but that creates all the md devices, not just those 
that are needed.

Will this new version allow me to remove this line in rc.sysinit again 
and put the 'auto=md' back into mdadm.conf?

Max.

Re: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 1.9.0 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux

[Neil Brown]

On Friday February 4, davidmaxwaterman@fastmail.co.uk wrote:
> Neil Brown wrote:
> >
> > Release 1.9.0 adds:
> ...
> >     -   --assemble --auto recognises 'standard' name and insists on using
> >         the appropriate major/minor number for them.
> 
> Is this the problem I encountered when I added auto=md to my mdadm.conf 
> file?

Probably.

> 
> It caused all sorts of problems - which were recoverable, fortunately.
> 
> I ended up putting a '/sbin/MAKEDEV md' into /etc/rc.sysinit just before 
> the call to mdadm, but that creates all the md devices, not just those 
> that are needed.
> 
> Will this new version allow me to remove this line in rc.sysinit again 
> and put the 'auto=md' back into mdadm.conf?

I think so, yes.  It is certainly worth a try and I would appreciate
success of failure reports.

NeilBrown