From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: md extension to support booting from raid whole disks. Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:20:06 -0700 Message-ID: <49F78F26.2040909@zytor.com> References: <1240574900.4507.2076.camel@ezra> <87hc0axhg9.fsf@frosties.localdomain> <49F68CE0.2010906@zytor.com> <1240957153.18303.689.camel@ezra> <18935.35747.471257.202356@notabene.brown> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <18935.35747.471257.202356@notabene.brown> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Neil Brown Cc: Daniel Reurich , Dan Williams , Goswin von Brederlow , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids 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.