Re: RAID1 on / planned?

[Charles Steinkuehler <charles@steinkuehler.net>]

Andrew Pollock wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 02:49:26PM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> > * Charles Steinkuehler <charles@steinkuehler.net> [2004-06-11 14:45]:
> > > I'm pretty handy with shell scripting, and could probably come up with a 
> > > fix to the grub stuff (espeically with the nice auto-detect stuff in 
> > > mkinitrd already working!), if that would be of assistance.
> >
> > It would be good if you could find out why LILO and GRUB fail in the
> > first place instead of being able to cope with the situation.  Then we
> > can figure out whether we need to put in a workaround or whether
> > LILO/GRUB should just get fixed.
>
> I'll look into it more closely after exams (if it isn't sorted by then) but
> I think in the case of GRUB (from what I've read wrt the hacks to get it to
> work) it's because /dev/md/0 doesn't correspond to a BIOS device.

This is my read on the problem, as well.  I believe what needs to happen is:

- grub-install needs to recognize a RAID device when installing, and 
install itself (ie setup <dev>) onto the device(s) making up the RAID, 
rather than trying to find /dev/md? as a BIOS device.

- update-grub needs to generally ignore the fact that / or /boot is 
installed on a RAID1 device (or correctly deal with it, if really 
necessary), and simply update the appropriate files in /boot and 
/boot/grub (which should already be mounted...no knowledge about how / 
or /boot or /boot/grub exist on BIOS devices should be required).

I'm back from a trip to the PCI-Sig DevCon and will try to work on this 
in the next couple of days.

--
Charles Steinkuehler
charles@steinkuehler.net