Dear Mr./Dr./Prof. Brown et al, I recently had the unpleasant experience of creating an MD array for the purpose of booting off it and then not being able to do so. Since I had already made changes to the array's contents relative to that which I cloned it from, I did not want to reformat the array and re-clone it just to bring it down to the old 0.90 metadata format so that I would be able to boot off it, so I searched for a solution, and I found it. First I tried the patch (written by Neil Brown) which can be seen at... <http://www.issociate.de/board/post/277868/> That patch did not work as-is, but with some more hacking, I got it working. I then cleaned up my work and added relevant comments. I know that Mr./Dr./Prof. Brown is against in-kernel boot-time MD assembly and prefers init[rd/ramfs], but I prefer in-kernel assembly, and I think several other people do too. Since this patch does not (AFAIK) disable the init[rd/ramfs] way of bringing up MDs in boot-time, I hope that this patch will be accepted and submitted up-stream for future inclusion in the mainline kernel.org kernel distribution. This way kernel users can choose their MD assembly strategy at will without having to restrict themselves to the old metadata format. I hope that this message finds all those who read it doing well and feeling fine. Sincerely, Abe Skolnik P.S. Mr./Dr./Prof. Brown, in case you read this: thanks! And if you want your name removed from the code, just say so.
Attachment:
add-ability-to-start-MDs-with-persistent-superblock-v1.x---update-against-2.6.22.4_.patch
Description: 3723671779-add-ability-to-start-MDs-with-persistent-superblock-v1.x---update-against-2.6.22.4_.patch
