1 Subject: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 2.5 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux
3 I am pleased to announce the availability of
6 It is available at the usual places:
7 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/
9 http://www.{countrycode}.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/
11 mdadm is a tool for creating, managing and monitoring
12 device arrays using the "md" driver in Linux, also
13 known as Software RAID arrays.
15 Release 2.5 adds a host of minor updates and one major update.
17 The major update involves an "Auto Assemble" function which will,
18 with certainly limits, scan all available devices for anything that
19 looks like an md array, and will try to assemble it.
20 This code should be treated with some caution as it is very new,
21 and could be revised in future, though hopefully not very much.
23 The main problem I have always had will auto-assembly is that it
24 is too easy for it to assemble thing that you don't want assembled,
25 e.g. if you have moved some devices from a different computer.
26 To remove this problem, arrays can now be tagged for the computer
27 that is their home (homehost) and only arrays with the correct
28 homehost will be auto-assembled.
30 Feedback on the effectiveness and usefulness of this feature and it's
31 documentation is encouraged.
34 - Support 'mailfrom' line in mdadm.conf so the From: line in alert
35 emails can be explicitly set.
36 - Arrange that SparesMissing (which is similar in import to
37 DegradedArray) generates an Email.
38 - Assume "DEVICE partitions" if no DEVICE line is given.
39 - Support new 'offset' layout for raid10.
40 - When creating a bitmap file, choose a chunksize to limit number
41 of bitmap chunks to 2 million. More than this can cause kmalloc
43 - New 'CREATE' line in mdadm.conf for defaults such as owner, group,
45 - --detail checks if array has been started or not and includes that
47 - When using --update=uuid on an array with a bitmap, update the
49 - Add a copy of /proc/mdstat to the mail message sent by mdadm
51 - New flag --no-degraded to avoid starting arrays if there are
52 fewer devices available than last time the array was started.
53 This is only needed with --scan, as with --scan, that behaviour
55 - Support for 'homehost' concept. This is a fairly major update.
56 It includes a configfile option and a command line option for
57 specifying a homehost, records that host in the superblock,
58 and reports the homehost where possible.
59 - Support for Auto Assembly. "mdadm -As" will, if provided with
60 the name of a homehost, try to assemble all arrays it can find
61 that were created for that homehost. See man pages for more details.
63 Development of mdadm is sponsored by
64 SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
66 NeilBrown 26th May 2006