Hi,
as many of you know I have been working on providing support in md
for converting between RAID5 and RAID6 as well as other conversion
like reducing the number of devices in a RAID5 or changing the chunk
size.
I think this work is ready for broader testing now, which means that
I think it reasonably complete and that if something does go wrong, I
strongly suspect that I will be able to help you put the array back
together.
However this comes with no warranty and you should always have
backups of important data.
To test it for me you need to checkout the "devel-3.1" branch of my
git://neil.brown.name/mdadm
git tree. And "make".
You also need a very recent kernel. get the lasted from Linus' git
tree and then
git pull git://neil.brown.name/md for-linus
(or wait a day or so and Linus will have pulled it).
Please don't try to clone the kernel from my server, it only has a
slow link to the world.
For most things it is safe to use 2.6.30, but I would recommend
getting the latest kernel to be on the safe side.
You should be able to convert RAID1->RAID5 and RAID5->RAID6 and back
again. Also you can change chunk size and layout and you can reduce
the number of devices in a RAID5. If you don't increase the --size
of the devices at the same, you will need to explicitly decrease the
--array-size first. mdadm will tell you what to do when that is
needed.
Success and failure reports are most welcome.
Thanks,
NeilBrown
--
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
