RAID autorun support for SunOS disk labels

RAID autorun support for SunOS disk labels

[Andrew Beresford]

Hi all,

After many hours spend last night trying to get my root filesystem
autorun when my kernel loads I discovered that sunos.c in fs/partitions
has no support for adding partitions to the list of eligible RAID
members. Before I go and fix the Solaris partition code (it can't work
out what type a partition is at the moment) and add in the
md_autodetect_dev() business, has anyone else already fixed this?

I have a patch at the moment, but it is evil (and tries to add *every*
partition to the RAID list) so I would prefer to do it properly before
releasing it on the world :)

Cheers,

Beezly

Re: RAID autorun support for SunOS disk labels

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 03:11, Andrew Beresford wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> After many hours spend last night trying to get my root filesystem
> autorun when my kernel loads I discovered that sunos.c in fs/partitions
> has no support for adding partitions to the list of eligible RAID
> members. Before I go and fix the Solaris partition code (it can't work
> out what type a partition is at the moment) and add in the
> md_autodetect_dev() business, has anyone else already fixed this?

As far as I know nobody has mucked around with the code for autodetect
stuff on non-DOS disklabels.  Neil Brown has been advocating that people
not use the partition types, and let the userspace tools set things up. 
You can find his arguments in the archives for this list (info
linux-raid to majordomo@vger.kernel.org should get you some links to the
archives).
	Greg

-- 
Portland, Oregon, USA.

Re: RAID autorun support for SunOS disk labels

[Andrew Beresford]

Hi Greg,

On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 11:34:09AM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> As far as I know nobody has mucked around with the code for autodetect
> stuff on non-DOS disklabels.  Neil Brown has been advocating that people
> not use the partition types, and let the userspace tools set things up. 
> You can find his arguments in the archives for this list (info
> linux-raid to majordomo@vger.kernel.org should get you some links to the
> archives).

Thanks for the information. I've had a flick through the archives and
read up why Neil disagrees with autodetection. However, in my case, the
RAID configuration is reasonably simple and initrd opens up a whole
world of hurt that I can just do without (I tried to go down this road -
admittedly it was 3 in the morning!). I'll create the patch anyway, although it's likely to be a week or so as I'm moving house this weekend. 

I figure that it's more useful to have the choice between autodetection or running raidstart under initrd. 

Cheers,

Beezly

Re: RAID autorun support for SunOS disk labels

[Hein Roehrig]

Andrew Beresford <beezly@beezly.org.uk> writes:

> [...] I'll create the patch anyway [...]

Did you ever get around to this? I would be very interested in such a
patch (need a drop-in replacement for a 2.2.17, can think about
initrd later when I am the console and not remote-debugging.)

TIA,
Hein

Re: RAID autorun support for SunOS disk labels

[Michael Tokarev]

Hein Roehrig wrote:
> 
> Andrew Beresford <beezly@beezly.org.uk> writes:
> 
> > [...] I'll create the patch anyway [...]
> 
> Did you ever get around to this? I would be very interested in such a
> patch (need a drop-in replacement for a 2.2.17, can think about
> initrd later when I am the console and not remote-debugging.)

What's wrong with using kernel command-line for raid - e.g.
 linux md=2,/dev/sda1,/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdc1
etc ?  No need for autodetection and no need for initrd.
Works here like a charm (2.4.x kernels, 2.2 has no such
option).

/mjt

Re: RAID autorun support for SunOS disk labels

[Hein Roehrig]

Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru> writes:

> What's wrong with using kernel command-line for raid - e.g.
>  linux md=2,/dev/sda1,/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdc1
> etc ?  No need for autodetection and no need for initrd.
> Works here like a charm (2.4.x kernels, 2.2 has no such
> option).

When you remove or exchange drives this is not nice. And I have six
disks in a set. I have a preliminary patch (posted in another message)
but now I have other transition problems 2.2.17->2.4.19-rc3. Once
these are resolved and I have the system working with 2.4.19, I am
going to think about a nice long-term solution.

Thanks,
Hein