From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Robinson Subject: Re: Linux mdadm superblock question. Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:42:56 +0000 Message-ID: <4B7A2250.5020909@anonymous.org.uk> References: <4877c76c1002111752h23e14f7aibe58a89181e6f493@mail.gmail.com> <4B77044B.1020609@zytor.com> <20100216112708.4a863f86@notabene.brown> <4B79F3CE.5030907@zytor.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org Cc: Linux RAID , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 16/02/2010 03:18, david@lang.hm wrote: > On Mon, 15 Feb 2010, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > >> On 02/15/2010 04:27 PM, Neil Brown wrote: >> >> There are three options: >> >> a) either don't boot from it (separate /boot); >> b) use a bootloader which installs in the MBR and >> hopefully-unpartitioned disk areas (e.g. Grub); >> c) use a nonstandard custom MBR. >> >> Neither (b) or (c), of course, allow for chainloading from another OS >> install and thus are bad for interoperability. > > I have had no problems with XFS partitions and lilo as the bootloader. > I've been doing this for a couple of years now without realizing that > there is supposed to be a problem. There isn't, if you use partitions. It could (would) go wrong if you tried to put an XFS filesystem, or md RAID with a v1.1 superblock, on a whole disc without a partition table *and* you tried to put a bootloader on. I can't say it's ever occurred to me to do that, because I always assumed that whatever I put in a partition used all of it, and I couldn't expect to double-book the beginning of it and have it work. Cheers, John.