Re: New mailing list for 2.6 Medley RAID (Silicon Image 3112 etc.) BIOS RAID development

Arjan van de Ven
2004-02-09T12:12:22Z

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On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 12:01:55PM +0000, Thomas Horsten wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>
> > > The reason I insist on autodetection is that I think it's important that if
> > > the BIOS will reckognise the drive without additional intervention, so will
> > > Linux. This will make the entry route for newbies much simpler.
> >
> > do you call running devicemapper tools from the initrd autodetection ?
>
> Probably not. I am working with several ways of doing it, and that's why I
> wanted to have a discussion about this.
>
> Ideally I'd want something like the MD autodetect code, so that the whole
> thing can be set up by the kernel at boot-time if the necessary drivers
> are compiled in (by reading the Medley superblock the same way it's done
> for 0xfe partitions).

I (and I suspect a lot of other folks) rather get rid of such autodetect and
move it to userspace. Either via initrd or initramfs.

> Having autodetection at kernel level would make it possible to boot from a
> kernel on a floppy disk without initrd support, and in general make a
> system easier to set up.

initrd/initramfs is increasingly becoming mandatory sort of, and it's
actually easy if not even default to set up. (Eg on Fedora / Red Hat even
just typing make install will auto-create this for you)

> But the reason I wanted this discussion is to figure out the best way to
> go about it, and if there are some good arguments against autodetecting in
> the kernel I'll listen to them.

It doesn't really belong there.

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