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Release 2.5.1
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1 Changes Prior to 2.5.1 release
2 - Various fixes for gcc warnings
3 - uclibc warnings
4 - Makefile improvements for static linking/intalling
5 - Makefile uninstall target
6 - Really fix return status of --examine
7 - Typos
8 - Byteorder stuff (again)
9 - Don't try to create devices with --manage or --grow
10 - allow default metadata (superblock) type to be specified
11 in mdadm.conf
12 - Get --stop to list devices stopped but honour --quiet
13 - remove libssl dependency
14 - Avoid some misdetection of overlapping partitions
15 - Fix memory leak in --monitor mode
16
17 Changes Prior to 2.5 release
18 - Support 'mailfrom' line in mdadm.conf so the From: line in alert
19 emails can be explicitly set.
20 - Arrange that SparesMissing (which is similar in import to
21 DegradedArray) generates an Email.
22 - Assume "DEVICE partitions" if no DEVICE line is given.
23 - Support new 'offset' layout for raid10.
24 - When creating a bitmap file, choose a chunksize to limit number
25 of bitmap chunks to 2 million. More than this can cause kmalloc
26 failure.
27 - New 'CREATE' line in mdadm.conf for defaults such as owner, group,
28 mode and auto-flag
29 - --detail checks if array has been started or not and includes that
30 in report.
31 - When using --update=uuid on an array with a bitmap, update the
32 bitmap's uuid too.
33 - Add a copy of /proc/mdstat to the mail message sent by mdadm
34 --monitor.
35 - New flag --no-degraded to avoid starting arrays if there are
36 fewer devices available than last time the array was started.
37 This is only needed with --scan, as with --scan, that behaviour
38 is the default.
39 - Support for 'homehost' concept. This is a fairly major update.
40 It includes a configfile option and a command line option for
41 specifying a homehost, records that host in the superblock,
42 and reports the homehost where possible.
43 - Support for Auto Assembly. "mdadm -As" will, if provided with
44 the name of a homehost, try to assemble all arrays it can find
45 that were created for that homehost. See man pages for more details.
46
47 Changes Prior to 2.4.1 release
48 - Honour --write-mostly when adding to an array without persistent
49 superblocks.
50 - Fix alignment problem in version-1 superblocks.
51 NOTE: This is an incompatable change affecting raid5 reshape.
52 If you want to reshape a raid5 using version-1 superblocks,
53 use 2.6.17-rc2 or later, and mdadm-2.4.1 or later.
54
55 Changes Prior to 2.4 release
56 - Rewrite 'reshape' support including performing a backup
57 of the critical region for a raid5 growth, and restoring that
58 backup after a crash.
59 - Put a 'canary' at each end of the backup so a corruption
60 can be more easily detected.
61 - Remove useless 'ident' arguement from ->getinfo_super method.
62 - Support --backup-file for backing-up critical section during
63 growth.
64 - Erase old superblocks (of different versions) when creating new
65 array.
66 - Allow --monitor to work with arrays with >28 devices
67 - Report reshape information in --detail
68 - Handle symlinks in /dev better
69 - Fix mess in --detail output which a device is missing.
70 - Manpage tidyup
71 - Support 'bitmap=' in mdadm.conf for auto-assembling arrays with
72 write-intent bitmaps in separate files.
73 - Updates to md.4 man page including section on RESTRIPING and SYSFS
74
75 Changes Prior to 2.3.1 release
76 - Fixed -O2 compile so I could make and RPM.
77 - Type cast number to be printed %llu so it compiles on 64bit
78 machines. (Thanks Luca).
79 - Stop using asm/byteorder.h - to make Redhat happy :-(
80 - Require bitmap files to have a '/' in their name.
81 - Error-check a few syscalls - code from SuSE package.
82
83 Changes Prior to 2.3 release
84 - Try /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf if /etc/mdadm.conf doesn't exist.
85 This provided compatability for Debian.
86 - Fixed for version-1 superblock:
87 report chunksize for raid6 and raid10
88 make sure device size used is a multiple of chunksize
89 - Fix "--assemble --scan" crash.
90 - Fix completely failure to create array on ppc64
91 - Fix memcmp in place of memcpy
92 - A few minor improvements to online help
93 - Clean up usage of 'long long' for used-size of devices, so
94 that it is possible to create a raid1 of 7TB devices!
95 - Make internal bitmaps work on 7TB raid1 arrays.
96 - Provide error message if --examine doesn't find any superblock.
97 - Report 'reshape' status in --examine - this depends on kernel
98 patches that are not yet finalised.
99 - Report bitmap status in --detail and --examine
100 - Default to v1 superblocks instead of v0.90 if the array
101 is too big for 0.90 to handle.
102 - Sort the output of "mdadm --detail --scan" so that it is
103 in a suitable order for assembling arrays. i.e. components come
104 before an array that they are part of.
105 - Print size of large reiserfs array properly went warning of
106 possible confilcts.
107
108 Changes Prior to 2.2 release
109 - Assorted bug fixes
110 - Support write-intent-bitmaps on raid10
111 - Support little-endian (Rather than hostendian) bitmaps.
112 - Return correct error code from 'mdadm -S'
113 - Remove extra blank line from 'mdadm -Eb' output.
114 - Improve option parsing so that -a and -b do not have
115 optional arguements: the arg is either required or not
116 depending on context.
117 - Allow scanning of devices listed in /proc/partitions even
118 if they don't appear in /dev.
119 - Support --assume-clean in --create mode as well as --build
120 - Add support for --monitor to report to syslog: -y or --syslog.
121 Thanks to Ross Vandegrift
122 - --monitor now reports which device failed in a 'Fail' message
123 This broke with 2.6
124 - Improve chance of array starting properly after a crash.
125 mdadm was insisting the event numbers were identical, but this
126 isn't needed, and is a problem if the crash was while the metadata
127 was being updated.
128 - Support --update==uuid
129 - Added README.initramfs and mkinitramfs to help people use an
130 initram for starting md arrays at boot.
131
132 Changes Prior to 2.1 release
133 - Fix assembling of raid10 array when devices are missing.
134 mdadm now correctly detects if a array is workable or not
135 depending on which devices are present, and so will correctly
136 handle "--assemble --force" if multiple devices have failed.
137 - Report raid10 layout in --examine output.
138 - Fix assembling of arrays that use the version-1 superblock and
139 have spares. Previously the spares would be ignored.
140 - Fix bug so that multiple drives can be re-added at once.
141 - Fix problem with hot-adding a bitmap to version-1-superblock
142 arrays.
143
144 Changes Prior to 2.0
145 - Support assembling from byte-swapped superblocks
146 metadata type "0.swap" and --update=byteorder
147 - write-mostly and write-behind support for raid1.
148 - Support --name= and 'name=' config entry for identifying
149 arrays be name.
150 - RAID10 in man pages.
151 - Lot of minor manpage updates
152
153 Changes Prior to 2.0-devel-3 release
154 - Assorted fixes for multiple bugs...
155 - Add test suite
156
157 Changes Prior to 1.12.0 release
158 Several of these are backported from the Debian package
159 - Don't use 'lstat' to check for blockdevices, use stat.
160 - Document --size=max option for --grow
161 - Document SparesMissing event and DeviceDisappeared/WrongLevel
162 - --stop --scan repeatly cycles until no more progress can be made
163 so that stack devices are stopped properly
164 - Minor type rationalisation for ident->uuid - now always 'int[]'
165 - Fix type in online help for --grow (was -F, now -G)
166 - Allow --auto command line option to set default auto=
167 value when running "--assemble --scan". Previously
168 --auto was ignored if --scan was given
169 - Fix a few type casts
170 - Fix parsing of /dev/md/N in is_standard
171 - Fix rounding errors in human_size()
172 - Fix silly example in mdadm.conf-examples
173 - When finding a /dev name for a device, prefer shorter names
174 - Suppress listing of devices= in --brief output of -D or -E,
175 unless -v is given (-vv gives the old behaviour with -Dsv).
176 This is because the device list can change and so is not a
177 stable aspect of the array
178 - Allow --force with --grow so '-Gfn1' works (on raid1)
179 - Replace sprintf calls with snprintf (to quiet diet-libc)
180 - Add man page for mdassemble
181 - Fix compilation with tinyc
182
183 Changes Prior to 1.11.0 release
184 - Fix embarassing bug which causes --add to always fail.
185
186 Changes Prior to 1.10.0 release
187 - Fix bug with --config=partitions
188 - Open sub-devices with O_EXCL to detect if already in use
189 - Make sure superblock updates are flushed directly to disk.
190
191 Changes Prior to 2.0-devel-1 release
192 - Support for version-1 superblock. See --metadata option.
193 - Support for bitmap based intent logging.
194 - Minor fixes.
195
196 Changes Prior to 1.9.0 release
197 - Fix rpm build problem (stray %)
198 - Minor manpage updates
199 - Change "dirty" status to "active" as it was confusing people.
200 - --assemble --auto recognises 'standard' name and insists on using
201 the appropriate major/minor number for them.
202 - Remove underscore from partition names, so partitions of
203 "foo" are "foo1", "foo2" etc (unchanged) and partitions of
204 "f00" are "f00p1", "f00p2" etc rather than "f00_p1"...
205 - Use "major", "minor", "makedev" macros instead of
206 "MAJOR", "MINOR", "MKDEV" so that large device numbers work
207 on 2.6 (providing you have glibc 2.3.3 or later).
208 - Add some missing closes of open file descriptors.
209 - Reread /proc/partition for every array assembled when using
210 it to find devices, rather than only once.
211 - Make "mdadm -Ss" stop stacked devices properly, by reversing the
212 order in which arrays are stopped.
213 - Improve some error messages.
214 - Allow device name to appear before first option, so e.g.
215 mdadm /dev/md0 -A /dev/sd[ab]
216 works.
217 - Assume '-Q' if just a device is given, rather than being silent.
218 - Change "dirty" status to "active" as it was confusing people.
219
220 Changes Prior to 1.8.0 release
221 - Makefile cleanup from Luca Berra <bluca@comedia.it>
222 - --pid-file (-i) to set a pid file to use with --monitor --daemonise
223 - Fix typo in mdadm man page
224 - Fix coredump when "-s" used with no config file present.
225 - Support new "faulty" personality which can inject synthetic
226 faults. (Not in kernel.org yet at 1Nov2004)
227 - Support raid0/linear on devices > 2 Terabytes
228 - Make sure raid6 resyncs when created with one missing device
229
230 Changes Prior to 1.7.0 release
231 - Support "--grow --add" to add a device to a linear array, if the
232 kernel supports it. Not documented yet.
233 - Restore support for uclibc which was broken recently.
234 - Several improvements to the output of --detail, including
235 reporting "resyncing" or "recovering" in the state.
236 - Close filedescriptor at end of --detail (exit would have closed it
237 anyway, so this isn't abig deal).
238 - Report "Sync checkpoint" in --examine output if appropriate.
239 - Add --update=resync for --assemble mode to for a resync when the
240 array is assembled.
241 - Add support for "raid10", which is under development in 2.6.
242 Not documented yet.
243 - --monitor now reads spare-group and spares info from config file
244 even when names of arrays to scan are given on the command line
245
246 Changes Prior to 1.6.0 release
247 - Device name given in -Eb is determined by examining /dev rather
248 than assuming /dev/md%d
249 - Fix bug in --monitor where an array could be held open an so
250 could not be stopped without killing mdadm.
251 - Add --grow mode. Currently only --size and --raid-disks can be
252 changed. Both require kernel support which, at the time of
253 writing, is not in a release kernel yet.
254 - Don't print out "errors" or "no-errors" in -D and -E, as the bit
255 is never set or used.
256 - Use md event notification in 2.6.??? to make --monitor mode
257 respond instantly to events.
258 - Add --auto= option and auto= configfile entry to tell mdadm to
259 create device files as needed. This is particularly useful
260 with partitioned arrays where the major device number can change.
261 - When generating --brief listing, if the standard name doesn't
262 exist, search /dev for one rather than using a temp name.
263 - Allow --build to build raid1 and multipath arrays.
264 - Add "--assume-clean" for Create and Build, particularly for raid1
265 Note: this is dangerous. Only use it if you are certain.
266 - Fix bug so that Rebuild status monitoring works again.
267 - Add "degraded" and "recovering" options to the "Status:"
268 entry for --detail
269
270 Changes Prior to 1.5.0 release
271 - new commands "mdassemble" which is a stripped-down equivalent of
272 "mdadm -As", that can be compiled with dietlibc.
273 Thanks to Luca Berra <bluca@comedia.it>.
274 It can be using in an initramfs or initrd.
275 - Fix compiling error with BLKGETSIZE64 and some signed/unsigned
276 comparison warnings.
277 - Add Rebuild Status (% complete) to --detail output.
278 - Support "--monitor --test" which will generate a test alert
279 for each array once, to test notification paths.
280 - Generate RebuildFinished event when rebuild finishes.
281 - Support for raid6 as found in 2.6.2 - thanks to
282 H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
283 - Support partitioned md arrays with a different major number and
284 naming scheme (md_dX in /proc/mdstat, /dev/md/dXpY in /dev).
285
286 Changes Prior to 1.4.0 release
287 - Document fact that creating a raid5 array really creates a
288 degraded array with a spare.
289 - Add "spares=" tag to config file and generate it wit --detail and
290 --examine
291 - Add "SparesMissing" event when --monitor first sees an array and
292 it doesn't have the enough spare devices.
293 - Add --update=summaries for --assemble to update summary
294 information in superblock, and correct other inconsistancies in
295 the superblock.
296 - Add --test option to --detail to set a meaningful exit status.
297
298 Changes Prior to 1.3.0 release
299 - Make 'size' and unsigned long in Create to allow creation of
300 larger arrays.
301 - Explicitly flag spare devices as 'spare' in --detail and --examine
302 output. Previously they simply had no flags lists.
303 - Make MailCmd (for monitor) configurable in Makefile, and default
304 to "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t". Also split out the warning related
305 flags into CWFLAGS for easier build configurability.
306 - Minor bugfix in Manage code.
307 - --monitor now notices and reports degraded arrays at startup using
308 "DegradedArray" event, and also has a --oneshot option to only
309 report DegradedArrays, and then exit.
310 - Small man-page clarification w.r.t. raid levels and raid4 in
311 particular.
312 - Disallow creation of arrays with only one device as this is
313 probably a mistake. --force will override this check.
314 - Correct some misleading documentation in the "mdadm --create --help"
315 message.
316 - Ignore chunksize if raid1 or multipath.
317 - Explicit statement in man page that raid-disks cannot be changed
318 after array is created.
319 - Improve message when attempting to start an array with
320 insufficient devices. Instead of required the array to be full,
321 we only require it has as many active devices as last time.
322
323 Changes Prior to 1.2.0 release
324 - Fix bug where --daemonise required an argument.
325 - In --assemble --verbose, print appropriate message if device is
326 not in devices= list
327 - Updated mdadm.conf.5 to reflect fact that device= takes wildcards
328 - Typos: componenet -> component
329 - Reduce size of "--help" message put excess into "--help-options"
330 - Fix bug introduced when MD_SB_DISKS dependancy removed, and which
331 caused spares not be assembled properly.
332 - Print appropriate message if --monitor --scan decides not to
333 monitor anything.
334 Changes Prior to 1.1.0 release
335 - add --deamonise flag for --monitor - forks and prints pid to stdout
336 - Fix bug so we REALLY clear dirty flag with -Af
337 - -Db now prints a 'devices=' word for each array.
338 - "mdadm -A /dev/md0" will get info from configfile, even without scan
339 - When assembling multipath arrays, ignore devices which are flagged
340 as having errors.
341 - take --super-minor=dev to mean "use the minor number of the mddev
342 being assembled.
343 - take --config=none to mean "completely ignore config file"
344 - Make --monitor require --scan or a device list.
345 Changes Prior to 1.0.9 release
346 - Documentation updates including kernel parameters documented
347 in md.4
348 - --assemble --force for raid4/5 will mark clean, needed for 2.5
349 - --detail prints out the events counter as well
350 - flush device before reading superblock to be sure to get
351 current data
352 - added mdadm.static target to makefile for static linking
353 - --monitor was ignoring /dev/md0 due to off-by-one error
354 - Fix assorted typos
355 - Fix printing of Gibibytes - calc was wrong.
356 - Fix printing of Array Size in --detail when very big.
357 - --monitor no longer tries to work for raid0 or linear as these
358 have nothing to be monitored.
359 - The word 'partitions' on a DEVICE line will cause all partitions
360 listed in /proc/partitions to be considered
361 - If the config file is called 'partitions' then it will be treated
362 as though it contained exactly 'device partitions' so e.g.
363 mdadm -Ebsc partitions
364 will find all raid partitions easily.
365 - successfully assemble multipath devices by ignoring raid_disk
366 value from superblock (it is always the same).
367 - --assemble not tied to MD_SB_DISKS limit quite so much
368 - Support compiling with tcc
369 - Support compiling with uclibc - just skip scan of /dev
370 - Add --update= option for Assemble mode. Either sparc2.2
371 or super-minor updates are possible. See mdadm.8
372
373 Changes Prior to 1.0.1 release
374 - Round off MB/GiB etc values instead of round down.
375 - Add --sparc2.2 option to examine to shift superblock around
376 and --sparc2.2update to rewrite the superblock
377 - Fix assorted typos in online help
378
379 Changes Prior to 1.0.0 release
380 - Allow --config with Misc mode (for --examine --scan)
381 - Add $(CXFLAGS) to end of CFLAGS in makefile
382 - When making an N disk raid5 array, the Nth drive
383 is moved to the end of the array as a spare rather than
384 being shifted up one place. This means that when the
385 kernel builds onto the last spare and inserts it,
386 the devices will be in the expected order.
387 - Man page improvements
388 Changes Prior to 0.8.2 release
389 - Correct spelling of persist[ae]nce/persist[ae]nt.
390 - Change "disk" to "device" in options and config file
391 - convert array size to "long long" *before* shift-left in -D and -Q
392
393 Changes Prior to 0.8.1 release
394 - Add "INSTALL" file.
395 - Fix some "i" variables that were not being set properly
396 - Initialise minsize and maxsize so that compilers don't complain.
397 - Tidy up Makefile and mdadm.spec installations
398 - Add "multipath" to documentation of valid levels
399
400 Changes Prior to 0.8 release
401 - Fix another bug in Assemble.c due to confusing 'i' with 'j'
402 - Minimal, untested, support for multipath
403 - re-write of argument parsing to have more coherent modes,
404 - add --query,-Q option
405 - Update mdadm.8 to reflect arg processing change and --query
406 - Change "long" to "unsigned long" for device sizes
407 - Handle "mailaddr" and "program" lines in config file for follow/scan mode.
408 - --follow --scan will exit if no program or mail found
409 - Add MAILADDR and PROGRAM to mdadm.conf-example
410 - Spell check man pages
411 - consistently use "component devices" instead of "subdevices"
412 - Make -Wall -Werror really work and fix lots of errors.
413 - --detail and --stop can have --scan which chooses devices from /proc/mdstat
414 - --monitor detects 20% changes in resync, failed spares,
415 disappearing arrays,
416 - --monitor --scan will automatically add any devices found in /proc/mdstat
417 - --monitor will move spares between arrays with same spare-group if necessary
418 - Documentation for Monitor Mode
419 - --query notes if the array containing the given device is active or not
420 - Finished md.4 man page.
421
422 Changes Prior to 0.7.2 release
423 - mdadm.spec updates and ifdef BLKGETSIZE64 from Luca Berra -- bluca@comedia.it
424 - more mdadm.spec updates from Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc@linuxweasel.com>
425 - make directory for mdadm.conf configurable in Makefile
426 - Finished mdadm.conf.5. Removed details of conf file from
427 mdadm.8 leaving a reference to mdadm.conf.5.
428 - Fix bug in Assemble.c, thanks to Junaid Rizvi <domdev@sat.net.pk>
429 - Get --assemble --force to make sure old major/minor numbers are
430 consistant, as md.c worries about this :-(
431
432
433 Changes Prior to 0.7.1 release
434 - update mdadm.spec
435 - use BLKGETSIZE64 if available for array size
436 - give human readable as GiB/MiB and GB and MB, with 2 decimal point precision
437 - Only warn about size variation for raid1/4/5.
438 - Started md.4 man page
439 - Started mdadm.conf.5 man page
440
441 Changes Prior to 0.7 release
442
443 - Fix makefile to install binary at /sbin and not /sbin/sbin
444 Also install man page.
445 - Add --zero-superblock based on --destroywithextremeprejudice
446 from Dale Stephenson <steph@snapserver.com>
447 - change name to mdadm. It is palandromic, and much nicer to pronouce.
448
449 Changes Prior to 0.6 release
450
451 - Remove the limit on the number of device names that can be
452 given on the command line.
453 - Fix bug in --assemble --force where it would only update a
454 single superblock.
455 - Fix bogus printing of big numbers not being block devices
456 when given names of devices that don't exist.
457 - When --assemble --force, consider superblocks with an event
458 count that is 1 behind as out-of-date. Normally they are
459 considered up-to-date (as the kernel assumes this too).
460 - When marking drives as not-failed in the superblock,
461 we also mark them as ACTIVE and SYNC.
462 - Don't start arrays for which not all drives are available unless:
463 --scan which implies that all drives were found automatically
464 --run which means the user knows what they want
465 --force which means that we are fixing something broken
466 - Make sure all device numbers passed as 3rd arg of ioctl
467 are passed as unsigned lock, so that it works on SPARC
468 - If HOT_ADD_DISK failes for -a, then only try ADD_NEW_DISK
469 if we cannot read from the array, i.e. if the array is
470 not started yet.
471 - man page update
472 - Taught Examine to handle --scan. It examines all devices listed
473 on DEVICE lines in the config file.
474 - Added --brief (-b) flag for Examine and Detail to print out
475 and mdctl.conf compatible description with uuid=, level=,
476 disks= and - for Examine - devices=
477 --examine --brief collects all devices the make the one array and
478 list them as one entry.
479 - Added level= and disks= options to ARRAY lines in config files
480 so --brief output could be used as-is.
481 - Make parity style ({left,right}-{,a}symmetric) consistantly use -,
482 never _.
483 - Add "Array Size" to --detail output
484 - Change "Size" to "Device Size" and exclude from Detail of arrays
485 that do not have a consistent device size.
486 - Add Human readable MiB or GiB value on size lines of Detail and Examine
487 - --assemble --scan doesn't complain about active drives
488 - require number of spares given in -x to be listed.
489 - Made --build actually work.
490 Changes Prior to 0.5 release
491
492 --assemble:
493 spare drives are handled properly.
494
495 --force can be used to recover from 2-drive failures on RAID5
496 If you belive that /dev/hda1 /dev/hdb1 /dev/hdc1 /dev/hdd1 should
497 make a raid5 array, but it has experienced multiple failures and
498 wont start, then
499
500 mdctl --assemble --force /dev/md0 /dev/hd[abcd]1
501
502 Should update the superblock on the newest failed drive and
503 restart the array in degraded mode. You should then remove the
504 remaining failed drive and re-add it (if you are happy that it
505 might work).
506
507 Ofcourse whenever you have a 2-drive failure, you have a risk
508 of corruption in data that hasn't be changed for a long time. So
509 this doesn't give you your array back all nice and happy, but it
510 does allow you to recover data that might not be corrupt.
511
512 More flexibility in identifying a RAID array in the mdctl.conf
513 e.g.
514 array /dev/md4 super-minor=4
515
516 assembles /dev/md4 from all devices found that have a raid
517 superblock that says the minor number of the array is 4.
518 If the blocks with the right minor number do not all have the
519 same UUID, an error is flags and no assembly happens.
520
521 array /dev/md3 devices=/dev/hd[abc]2
522
523 Assembles /dev/md3 drom /dev/hda2 /dev/hdb2 and/dev/hdc2. All
524 devices must exist and have raid superblock with the same uuid.
525
526 If two identity specifiers are used, only devices that match all
527 of them are considered, so
528
529 array /dev/md2 devices=/dev/hd?2 super-minor=2
530
531 will assemble /dev/md2 using all /dev/hd?2 devices which have a
532 raid superblock with minor number 2.
533
534 --create:
535 When listing devices for --create, the word "missing" can be
536 used to indicate that the respective slot does not have a
537 working drive currently. This is similar to the "failed-disk"
538 directive in mkraid/raidtab.
539 e.g.
540 mdctl --create --level=5 -raid-disks=4 --spare-disks=2
541 /dev/md0 /dev/sda /dev/sdb missing /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde
542
543 will create a raid5 array with the third slot empty, and two
544 spares.
545
546 By default, raid5 arrays are created with the last slot empty
547 and drive listed for the last slot added as a spare. If a
548 "missing" slot is given, or if --force is given, then --create
549 does exactly what you ask and doesn't try to be clever.
550
551
552 --follow / --monitor:
553
554 This is a new mode. I couldn't stop my self from picking a name
555 starting with F (as current modes start A,B,C,D,E) but I
556 relented and provided an alternate name that is somewhat more
557 meaningful.
558
559 In this mode, mdctl does not exit, but runs continuously and
560 periodically polls all the md devices to see if they have had
561 any interested state change.
562 The changes that it currently notices are:
563 Fail - an active disc fails
564 FailSpare - a spare, that was presumably being build, fails
565 ActiveSpare - a spare becomes active, presumably after a rebuild.
566
567 Options:
568 --mail mailaddress - send Email on any Fail* event
569 --program program - run the program on any event.
570 Args are: eventname mddevice subdevice(if-known)
571 --delay seconds - change from the default 60second pause
572 between polls.
573
574 I plan to add functionality to this mode to allow sharing of
575 spare drives. If an array is marks "spare-group=fred", and it
576 has a failed drive and no spares, and if some other array is
577 also "spare-group=fred" and it has no failed drives, but does
578 have a spare drive that is big enough, the spare will be moved
579 to the first array.
580
581 I also have the idea of adding a --grow mode which will re-organise
582 the data on an N disk raid0/4/5 array to be on an N+M disk array.
583 I have no concrete plans for this though.
584
585 I got rid of the "v" in the archive file name, and include the
586 version number in the directory created by the archive.
587
588 There is now a man page and mdctl.spec (for rpm) thanks to
589 Danilo Godec <danci@agenda.si>.
590
591 Ofcourse, the man page is now out of date and despite being based on
592 the --help output, is not wholy correct. After I get --follow
593 working properly, I plan to revise the various documentation and/or
594 the code to make sure the two match.