ANNOUNCE-3.2.1

   1
   2
   3 I am pleased to announce the availability of
   4    mdadm version 3.2.1
   5
   6 It is available at the usual places:
   7    countrycode=xx.
   8    http://www.${countrycode}kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/
   9 and via git at
  10    git://neil.brown.name/mdadm
  11    http://neil.brown.name/git/mdadm
  12
  13 Many of the changes in this release are of internal interest only,
  14 restructuring and refactoring code and so forth.
  15
  16 Most of the bugs found and fixed during development for 3.2.1 have been
  17 back-ported for the recently-release 3.1.5 so this release primarily
  18 provides a few new features over 3.1.5.
  19
  20 They 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
  69 While mdadm-3.2.1 is considered to be reasonably stable, you should
  70 only use it if you want to try out the new features, or if you
  71 generally like to be on the bleeding edge.   If the new features are not
  72 important to you, then 3.1.5 is probably the appropriate version to be using
  73 until 3.2.2 comes out.
  74
  75 NeilBrown 28th March 2011