Subject: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 2.4 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux I am pleased to announce the availability of mdadm version 2.4 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 2.4 primarily adds support for increasing the number of devices in a RAID5 array, which requires 2.6.17 (or some -rc or -mm prerelease). It also includes a number of minor functionality enhancements and documentation updates. Changelog Entries: - Rewrite 'reshape' support including performing a backup of the critical region for a raid5 growth, and restoring that backup after a crash. - Put a 'canary' at each end of the backup so a corruption can be more easily detected. - Remove useless 'ident' arguement from ->getinfo_super method. - Support --backup-file for backing-up critical section during growth. - Erase old superblocks (of different versions) when creating new array. - Allow --monitor to work with arrays with >28 devices - Report reshape information in --detail - Handle symlinks in /dev better - Fix mess in --detail output which a device is missing. - Manpage tidyup - Support 'bitmap=' in mdadm.conf for auto-assembling arrays with write-intent bitmaps in separate files. - Updates to md.4 man page including section on RESTRIPING and SYSFS Development of mdadm is sponsored by SUSE Labs, Novell Inc. NeilBrown 30th March 2006