installing on mdraid imsm arrays
At work, we're using mainly supermicro servers, and they have support in
the BIOS for Intel Matrix raid (imsm), which is a form of
sataraid/fakeraid. So I have been looking at installing debian on such a
"raid" system. d-i supports dmraid somewhat, nowadays, but the package
in wheezy is out of date, and I have the impression that support for
monitoring/rebuilding of arrays by dmraid isn't all that good. It also
looks like dmraid is not maintained by upstream anymore.
Now I also noticed when booting the wheezy installer on a system with
the disks configured as imsm, that the mdraid support of the installer
actually reckognizes the array as imsm. And that in fact the imsm
support in mdadm is quite good. The installer crashes though when trying
to access that array, since the mdadm udeb misses 'mdmon'. But that is
easily fixed.
I now have a version of the wheezy installer that succesfully installs
and boots debian on a mdadm imsm array.
I had to fix/update mdadm (bug #684708), libparted (bug #684713) and
lvm2 (bug #684712).
wrt d-i, I had to fix up the following packages:
- partman-auto: allow partioned md devices
- partman-base: filter out devices that are part of a
partioned md device
- grub-installer: reckognize partitioned md devices and install
grub on all the underlaying devices (only for RAID1 right now)
Do you think that it would be worth it to integrate this for the wheezy
release? If so, should I post patches for review on a webpage somewhere,
or here on the list, or just submit them as bugs against their
respective packages?
Thanks,
Mike.
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