]> git.ipfire.org Git - thirdparty/mdadm.git/blame - ANNOUNCE-3.2.1
Release mdadm-3.3.4
[thirdparty/mdadm.git] / ANNOUNCE-3.2.1
CommitLineData
7b0bbd0f
N
1
2
3I am pleased to announce the availability of
4 mdadm version 3.2.1
5
6It is available at the usual places:
7 countrycode=xx.
8 http://www.${countrycode}kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/
9and via git at
10 git://neil.brown.name/mdadm
11 http://neil.brown.name/git/mdadm
12
13Many of the changes in this release are of internal interest only,
14restructuring and refactoring code and so forth.
15
16Most of the bugs found and fixed during development for 3.2.1 have been
17back-ported for the recently-release 3.1.5 so this release primarily
18provides a few new features over 3.1.5.
19
20They include:
21 - policy framework
22 Policy can be expressed for moving spare devices between arrays, and
23 for how to handle hot-plugged devices. This policy can be different
24 for devices plugged in to different controllers etc.
25 This, for example, allows a configuration where when a device is plugged
26 in it is immediately included in an md array as a hot spare and
27 possibly starts recovery immediately if an array is degraded.
28
29 - some understanding of mbr and gpt paritition tables
30 This is primarly to support the new hot-plug support. If a
31 device is plugged in and policy suggests it should have a partition table,
32 the partition table will be copied from a suitably similar device, and
33 then the partitions will hot-plug and can then be added to md arrays.
34
35 - "--incremental --remove" can remember where a device was removed from
36 so if a device gets plugged back in the same place, special policy applies
37 to it, allowing it to be included in an array even if a general hotplug
38 will not be included.
39
40 - enhanced reshape options, including growing a RAID0 by converting to RAID4,
41 restriping, and converting back. Also convertions between RAID0 and
42 RAID10 and between RAID1 and RAID10 are possible (with a suitably recent
43 kernel).
44
45 - spare migration for IMSM arrays.
46 Spare migration can now work across 'containers' using non-native metadata
47 and specifically Intel's IMSM arrays support spare migrations.
48
49 - OLCE and level migration for Intel IMSM arrays.
50 OnLine Capacity Expansion and level migration (e.g. RAID0 -> RAID5) is
51 supported for Intel Matrix Storage Manager arrays.
52 This support is currently 'experimental' for technical reasons. It can
53 be enabled with "export MDADM_EXPERIMENTAL=1"
54
55 - avoid including wayward devices
56 If you split a RAID1, mount the two halves as two separate degraded RAID1s,
57 and then later bring the two back together, it is possible that the md
58 metadata won't properly show that one must over-ride the other.
59 mdadm now does extra checking to detect this possibilty and avoid
60 potentially corrupting data.
61
62 - remove any possible confusion between similar options.
63 e.g. --brief and --bitmap were mapped to 'b' and mdadm wouldn't
64 notice if one was used where the other was expected.
65
66 - allow K,M,G suffixes on chunk sizes
67
68
69While mdadm-3.2.1 is considered to be reasonably stable, you should
70only use it if you want to try out the new features, or if you
71generally like to be on the bleeding edge. If the new features are not
72important to you, then 3.1.5 is probably the appropriate version to be using
73until 3.2.2 comes out.
74
75NeilBrown 28th March 2011