mdadm and raidtools

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 01:28:07PM -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > > initrds currently just call the RAID autostart ioctl from within nash.
> > > Switching to mdadm here is going to make things a bit larger :/
> >  
> > I know.  That's why doing a live upgrade is a bit of a hassle. :-/
> 
> No, there are more things that make live upgrades a hassle.  eg, you're
> going to need to upgrade rpm before you can upgrade other things (so
> that you have an rpm that's capable of setting file contexts) but the
> new rpm might end up depending on a newer glibc ... and things spiral
> poorly from there.

Sorry, I was unclear here.  By "live upgrade", I was referring to my
earlier e-mail, where I mentioned doing an upgrade on the failed-out
drive from a RAID1 pair, and then booting that drive.  I should have
said "with minimal service interruption."  The tricky thing with doing
this is handling md minors and/or fs labels.

> The very basic IDE disks case still fits on a floppy.  And that's still
> the vast majority of users for right now.  I'd like to kill floppies
> more than anyone, but everytime it gets mentioned there's a pretty large
> outcry.  See a number of previous threads on the subject.
 
Fair enough.

> I'm not convinced this is the right approach.  Although flexibility is a
> good thing, too much flexibility is a bad thing.  I'd rather continue to
> extend mkinitrd with small, logical changes than go and overengineer a
> completely new way of doing things.
 
That's fine too - there is no reason that multiple mkinitrd/mkinitramfs
implementations can't exist, as long as they are compatible with rc.sysinit.
I'm happy to cobble together something for my own needs, see whether anyone
else finds it useful, and ask for small, logical changes to rc.sysinit
as necessary. :-)

Regards,

	Bill Rugolsky