Re: Proposed enhancements to MD

Kevin P. Fleming
2004-01-14T16:54:36Z

Kevin Corry wrote:

> I guess I simply don't understand the desire to partition MD devices when
> putting LVM on top of MD provides *WAY* more flexibility. You can resize any
> volume in your group, as well as add new disks or raid devices in the future
> and expand existing volumes across those new devices. All of this is quite a
> pain with just partitions.

In a nutshell: other OS compatibility. Not that I care, but they're
trying to cater to the users that have both Linux and Windows (and other
stuff) installed on a RAID-1 created by their BIOS RAID driver. In that
situation, they can't use logical volumes for the other OS partitions,
they've got to have an MSDOS partition table on top of the RAID device.

However, that does not mean this needs to be done in the kernel, they
can easily use a (future) dm-partx that reads the partition table and
tells DM what devices to make from the RAID device.