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Hi Bryn,
Thank for the comments. The complete picture is slowly evolving. > > dmraid. So it would be a good idea to remove the partitioning > > support from dmraid. This will mean the package maintainer will > > need to make dmraid dependent on kpartx for it to work. > > It already does in most (all?) distributions that ship it. Probably Debian is legging behind here, as dmraid is unmaintained AFAIK. > > One remark on this: I found that on Debian to make kpartx work > > with dmraid during boot, one needs to make some changes to the > > multipath-tools packages. > > What were the changes? The kpartx command is part of multipath-tools > and although it's common to have it in a separate sub-package (all > current Red Hat and Fedora distros do this) they are part of the same > project upstream. On Debain there is a package called multipath-tools-boot, which will add multipath, kpartx, and dmsetup to the initramfs. But I did not liked what multipath was doing to the /dev/mapper directory. So I mimicked ubuntu and made a separate package kpartx-boot. So when I come to think of it, maybe it worked out of the debian-box, apart from some warnings during boot. > > On a side note: Why does mdadm support MBR and GPT? > > Not sure what you're asking here? The kernel MD driver creates > partitionable devices so you can use any of the label formats that are > enabled in the kernel you're running (although really, MBR and GPT are > the only ones that make sense for most systems today). I do not know the finer detail of mdadm, yet. But I saw super-mbr.c and super-gpt.c and and draw the conclusion, taken how dmraid handles mbr, that these were codes to parse mbt and gpt partition tables. > I think adding new format handlers to MD is a much better idea; the > dominant formats backed by major OEMs are already using it so if > there's interest in the less commonly used formats I think they would > see much better maintenance and continued development in an active > project like mdadm than they would in a revived dmraid. So it would be time that someone(probably me) starts adding the Promise formats used by the AMD chip-sets. > > Just one last question I never really got an answer to. Can one > > use mdadm on a dual boot system(MS and Linux) were the RAID > > partitions are shared? In other words will mdadm leave the metadata > > on the disks unchanged or in a state the the MS drivers can still > > recognize the RAID. > > Assuming that MD supports the format handler you need: yes. That is nice to hear. > I think the time would be better spent learning or contributing to MD > and mdadm development and adding support for other format handlers > that have users wanting native Linux support. Then it is time for me to start reading into mdadm. Kind regards, Mark-Willem |
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