RAID-5 design bug (or misfeature)

From: Mikulas Patocka
Date: Sun May 29 2005 - 17:54:20 EST


Hi

RAID-5 has rather serious design bug --- when two disks become temporarily
inaccessible (as it happened to me because of high temperature in server
room), linux writes information about these errors to the remaining disks
and when failed disks are on line again, RAID-5 won't ever be accessible.

RAID-HOWTO lists some actions that can be done in this case, but none of
them can be done if root filesystem is on RAID --- the machine just won't
boot.

I think Linux should stop accessing all disks in RAID-5 array if two disks
fail and not write "this array is dead" in superblocks on remaining disks,
efficiently destroying the whole array.

Mikulas
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