Neil, The following set of 9 patches is composed of three sets: 1) Patches 1-6 are small updates and fixes to what is already in the kernel. 2) Patch 7 introduces a new superblock type for device-mapper - allowing it to record failures and give future support for reshaping and bitmap use. 3) Patches 8-9 provide bitmap support. Patch 9 is necessary for transient failures, where the bitmap can be replayed to recover a disk that has been gone for a short time. Without patch 9, raid5 will simply force a complete resync. The first set by itself fixes a couple issues and protects against the possibility that dm-raid.c attempts to utilize super_types that may not exist. The addition of the second set provides a working solution that is useful to LVM in addition to (userspace) dm-raid. The final set is not absolutely necessary, but provides the obvious recovery speed-up. I have seen an issue related to the MD recovery thread starting up before the bitmap has been properly loaded. This issue is not a result of this patchset, nor is it addressed by this patch set. Until I find a way to fix this issue, the 3rd set may be problematic and we may wish to defer it until I have a solution. brassow -- 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
