Re: md extension to support booting from raid whole disks.

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Neil Brown wrote:
> 
> That only leaves the question of what happens when a spare is added to
> the array - how does the grub data get written to the space on the
> spare.
> I would rather that grub were responsible for this, than for md to
> treat that unused space as RAID1.
> We already have a notification system based on "mdadm --monitor" to
> process events.  We could possibly plug grub in to that somehow so
> that it gets told to re-write all it's special blocks every time
> something significant changes in the array.
> 

I have multiple issues with this concept (including promoting Grub2, but
let's not get into that.)

For this to be reliable, there is only one sensible configuration, which
is for /boot to be a RAID-1, which is better handled by -- guess what --
partitioning systems; and we already have quite a few of those that work
just fine, thank you.  Otherwise there WILL be configurations -- caused
by controller failures if nothing else -- that simply will not boot even
though the system is otherwise functional.  Promoting this kind of stuff
is criminally stupid.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.