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Subject: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 1.8.1 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux - DEVELOPMENT version
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I am pleased to announce the availability of
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http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/
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http://www.{countrycode}.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/
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as a source tar-ball and (at the first site) as an SRPM, and as an RPM for i386.
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This is a "development" release of mdadm. It should *not* be
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considered stable and should be used primarily for testing.
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The current "stable" version is 1.8.0.
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Release 1.8.1 supports different styles of superblocks (aka RAID metadata).
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Two formats are currently supported
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version 0.90.0 - the traditional Linux RAID superblock
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version 1 - a new superblock which less useless information and some more
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Version 1 supports more than 28 devices in an array, and RAID1 and greater over
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devices larger than 2TB (though a 2TB RAID1 would take forever to resync!).
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mdadm 1.8.1 takes a different approach to creating arrays than
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previous versions, though this is largely transparent. Instead of
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giving the devices to the kernel and letting it "create" the array and
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write out initial superblocks, mdadm 1.8.1 writes out the initial
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superblocks itself, thus creating the array, and then asks the kernel
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to assemble that array.
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Version 1 superblocks requires 2.6.10 or a recent 2.6.10-rc snapshot.
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Enhancements that are expected before this becomes 2.0.0:
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- mdassemble currently doesn't compile
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- version 1 superblocks have room for a label, which currently isn't used.
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Setting the label, and assembling arrays by label will be supported.
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A label like "$HOSTNAME-root" could be the standard label for the device
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containing the root filesystem for $HOSTNAME.
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Development of mdadm is sponsored by CSE@UNSW:
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The School of Computer Science and Engineering
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The University of New South Wales
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NeilBrown 05 November 2004