How many RAID devices can you define?

[Robert Washburne <hormel331@comcast.net>]

I am setting up a file server using Gentoo 2005.1, kernel 2.6.14-r2

The installed system creates eight RAID devices - /dev/md[0-7], /dev/md/[0-7]

I wish to create nine RAIDs, so I used "mknod /dev/md/8 b 9 8" to create another
device (and its associated link, /dev/md8).

The hardware consists of a 650 MHz AMD Duron with 1 GB ram.  Four WD 250 GB IDE
drives are connected to the four IDE busses of two Promise Technologies IDE
ATA100 controlers.  The drives are all partitioned the same using partitions
[1-3, 5-12].

I used raidtools to define and create the RAIDs.

The first eight devices created and synced with no problem (seven RAID5 and one
RAID0).  But when I created the ninth RAID5, it got about 30% through the sync
and then the system hung.  Keyboard was dead.  I had to power-cycle.

The the system came back up, it continued to sync, but hung again after a minute
or two.

Is there a hard limit of only eight RAID devices?

If so, can this limit be readily increased?

If need be, I can repartition my drives and reduce the RAIDs to only eight, but
I would prefer to keep the nine, if possible.

Thanks in advance!

Bob W.