On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 01:50:13PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Do any docs exist, that describe the on-disk md format? Not as such. An H-file isn't a document in itself... > I'm talking with a vendor that would like to support booting off of > "Linux RAID" (as they call it), from their card's BIOS, which implies > the vendor would need to add support for the md format to their BIOS. > > Jeff Problem there is the multitude of partition schemes, and that RAID superblocks are inside the partitions... Nevertheless I would love to be able to boot from _any_ of disks in a bootable RAID1 diskset. I have just experimented with Highpoint's RocketRaid 1520, which almost can do that. It fails if the primary disk is offline, but succeeds if secondary is out. I also liked their superblock location - very early in disk. Negative thing in the HPT BIOS is, that if it detects a fault, it wants user input instead of just trying starting disks a bit more persistently, and continuing _soon_ the boot in degraded RAID1 mode without any user input. After all, Sun has been able to do that for a very long time, it should be possible in PC hardware, too. (In Suns we have to define a set of boot devices into prom level, and there all devices are different, and retain their identity forever independent of plugging new interface cards into system, but that is another story...) /Matti Aarnio - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
