Subject: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 2.0 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux I am (at last) please to announce the availability of mdadm version 2.0 It is available at the usual places: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/ and http://www.{countrycode}.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/ mdadm is a tool for creating, managing and monitoring device arrays using the "md" driver in Linux, also known as Software RAID arrays. Release 2.0 contains a substantial rewrite of various pieces of functionality, particularly the --create option. This enables support for a new style of superblock - the version-1 superblock. Version-1 can support many more than 28 devices and can be easily moved between hosts with different endian-ness. Release 2.0 also contains support for the recent bitmap-intent-logging which will appear in 2.6.13, and the RAID1 write-behind that will be available in 2.6.14 (it is currently only in -mm). This release comes with a test-suite which has been used to verify that mdadm-2.0 actually works in a number of common scenarios. Some of the tests require a bleeding-edge kernel, so don't be surprised if some fail on kernels prior to 2.6.14. Being a '.0' release, 2.0 should be treated with some caution. However I believe it is quite stable and can safely be used on production systems. Note that this release is "2.0", not "2.0.0". I never found a use for the third number with 1.X.Y, so I dropped it. Development of mdadm has moved from CSE@UNSW and is now sponsored by SUSE Labs, Novell Inc. NeilBrown 26th August 2005