dracut waiting for background mdadm reconstruction to complete

[Daniel Drake]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> wrote:
> Daniel Drake writes:
>
>> My understanding is that this reconstruction is a background task, is
>> there really a need for this to hold up boot?
>>
>> This behaviour comes from
>> 0064-90mdraid-wait-for-md-devices-to-become-clean.patch in the
>> dracut-013-19.fc16 package.
>
>
> What part dracut runs during boot?

Not sure if I understand the question.
Dracut runs "mdadm -W" for each mdraid device during every boot when
the mdraid module is included in the initramfs. This is illustrated
clearly in the patch in question:

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=dracut.git;a=blob;f=0064-90mdraid-wait-for-md-devices-to-become-clean.patch;h=58c786cc5ca0b94fd138674c54417c29c38befc0;hb=refs/heads/f16

-W is documented to behave as follows:

       -W, --wait
              For each md device given, wait  for  any  resync,  recovery,  or
              reshape  activity to finish before returning.  mdadm will return
              with success if it actually waited for every device listed, oth‐
              erwise it will return failure.

Thanks,
Daniel