Re: Linux mdadm superblock question.

From: Asdo
Date: Sun Feb 14 2010 - 15:47:39 EST


Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
On Sat, 13 Feb 2010, Michael Evans wrote:
I remember hearing that 1.x had /no/ plans for kernel level
auto-detection ever. That can be accomplished in early-userspace
leaving the code in the kernel much less complex, and therefore far
more reliable.

Yes, it is far more reliable kernel side, if only because it doesn't do
anything.

But the userspace reliability is _not_ good. initrds are a source of
problems the moment things start to go wrong, and that's when they are not
the problem themselves.

And the end result is a system that needs manual intervention to get its
root filesystem back.

In my experience, every time we moved critical codepaths to userspace, we
ended up decreasing the *overall* system reliability.
I don't see it like this.
You have the same chance to screw up the system by making mistakes in the files in /etc, in the networking config, the firewall, the server applications...
(note: I speak for Debian/Ubuntu, redhat's initramfs I think is more messy.)
1.x autodetection worked great for me in initramfs. Basically you only need /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf copied to initramfs (via update-initramfs), the rest is done by Debian/Ubuntu standard initramfs procedure.
Also consider 1.x allows to choose which arrays are autoassembled (hostname written in the array name equal to hostname in the machine or specified in mdadm.conf): this is more precise than 0.9 which autoassembles all, I think.
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