Hi Linuxers,
the Linux soft RAID-1 driver is available now, you can get it from:
http://www.nuclecu.unam.mx/~miguel/raid
It's a beta release, this means that it has passed a standard 20 hour
stress-test on our systems, but othewise it hasnt been tested on a wide
range of systems yet.
[the rest of this mail will be put into a README file :)]
There are two patches, against 2.1.26 and 2.0.29. After applying the
patch, a new kernel config option is available under 'Multiple devices
driver support'. You have to recompile the whole kernel.
The patch was tested on x86 and Sparc platforms, but should be fine for
other platforms too. The Linux RAID driver introduces a new 'RAID
superblock' disk partition label at the >end< of each RAID device.
Currently this superblock is always stored in native byte order. Otherwise
there are no endianness/word size assuptions. All succeeding RAID versions
will provide clean migration paths.
There is a set of tools available for creating and checking RAID-1
partitions, as the driver always checks 'image cleanness' before running
an array. (this is similar to the ext2fs filesystem cleanness flag). The
QuickStart file in the raidtools.tar.gz package describes how to set up a
2 disks mirror.
Filesystems created on RAID-1 devices are backwards compatible, ie. they
can be mounted (separately) on a kernel that has no RAID-1 support. Such
filesystems will be smaller by a few blocks. (but the filesystem never
sees the RAID-1 configuration data).
Questions, reports, comments/suggestions welcome: they can be sent either
to the authors (Gadi Oxman <gadio@netvision.net.il>, Miguel de Icaza
<miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@pc5829.hil.siemens.at>),
or to the following mailing lists:
raiddev@nuclecu.unam.mx
linux-raid@vger.rutgers.edu
(raiddev is a public majordomo list)
-- mingo