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1Subject: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 2.6 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux
2
3I am pleased to announce the availability of
4 mdadm version 2.6
5
6It is available at the usual places:
7 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/
8and
9 countrycode=xx.
10 http://www.${countrycode}kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/
11and via git at
12 git://neil.brown.name/mdadm
13 http://neil.brown.name/git?p=mdadm
14
15mdadm is a tool for creating, managing and monitoring
16device arrays using the "md" driver in Linux, also
17known as Software RAID arrays.
18
19Release 2.6 adds assorted fixes and improvements and a new major mode.
20"Incremental Assembly" via -I or --incremental can be used to
21assemble an array one device at a time. The idea is that you get
22udev to run "mdadm -Iq devicename" on each new block device that it
23finds. Anything that is part of an array gets included in an array as
24appropriate.
25Two special notes:
26 1/ This is very new code and is probably buggy. It passes a few basic
27 tests, and helped me find some kernel bugs, but it is still fresh
28 and should not be considered 'stable'. Please test and provide
29 feedback.
30 2/ There is a bug in the linux kernel that makes incremental assembly
31 not possible in general (you cannot safely remove a drive from an array
32 that has not yet been started. This is needed if an old device was
33 detected first). If mdadm detects a kernel which might have the
34 bug, it rejects --incremental requests.
35 The bug will hopefully be fixed in 2.6.20 and this mdadm release
36 contains patches for 2.6.18, 2.6.18.6 and 2.6.19. Apply the
37 appropriate patch to test --incremental.
38
39Changelog Entries:
40 - Fixed UUID printing in "--detail --brief" for version1 metadata.
41 - --update=resync did exactly the wrong thing for version1 metadata.
42 It caused a resync to not happen, rather than to happen.
43 - Allow --assemble --force to mark a raid6 clean when it has two
44 missing devices (which is needed else if won't assemble.
45 Without this fix it would only assemble if one or zero
46 missing devices.
47 - Support --update=devicesize for cases where the underlying device
48 can change size.
49 - Default to --auto=yes so the array devices with 'standard' names
50 get created automatically, as this is almost always what is wanted.
51 - Give useful message if raid4/5/6 cannot be started because it is
52 not clean and is also degraded.
53 - Increase raid456 stripe cache size if needed to --grow the array.
54 The setting used unfortunately requires intimate knowledge of the
55 kernel, and it not reset when the reshape finishes.
56 - Change 'Device Size' to 'Used Dev Size' because it only shows how
57 much of each device is actually used, not how big they are.
58 - --wait or -W will wait for resync activity to finish on the given
59 devices.
60 - Fix some problems with --update=uuid and add a test.
61 - If two drives in a raid5 disappear at the same time, then "-Af"
62 will add them both in rather than just one and forcing the array
63 to 'clean'. This is slightly safer in some cases.
64 - Check device is large enough before hot-add: this improves quality
65 of error message.
66 - Don't hold md device open for so long in --monitor mode - map_dev
67 can be slow and interferes with trying to stop the array.
68 - Support --uuid= with --create to choose your own UUID.
69 - New major more "--incremental" for incremental assemble of arrays,
70 intended for use with udev.
71
72Development of mdadm is sponsored by
73 SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
74
75NeilBrown 21st December 2006
76Blessed Christmas to all.