Neil Brown <neilb@xxxxxxx> writes: > In 2.6.30 and later you wont even need the downtime. Just > echo raid5 > /sys/block/md9/md/level > in place of the "stop" and "create" steps. Hurray. It is great to see the raid driver improving all the time. Great work all of you. >> Now for the raid6 case. With only 1 data disk and 2 parity disks all 3 >> disks should end up with identical data on them. In effect this should >> be a 3 disk raid1, a cpu intensive one. Take an existing raid1 with 2 >> or 3 disks, stop the raid, create a new raid6 ovver it with >> --assume-clean, start the raid. After that one can add more disks and >> --grow -n 4/5/6/.. the raid6 to a sensible size. Again without going >> into degraded mode. >> >> >> So back to my original question: Why does the kernel require 4 disks >> for a raid6 instead of allowing 3? > > I have occasionally wondered that. But I didn't write that code and > never saw a need to change it. As Andre says, it is very likely that > just relaxing the restriction will allow it to "just work". > > Maybe that will happen in 2.6.31... > > NeilBrown Time for try&error. I only checked one raid6 algorithm but that seemed to be fine with 3 disks. MfG Goswin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html