Re: installing on mdraid imsm arrays
Hi
Miquel van Smoorenburg <miquels@debian.org> writes:
> 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 in wheezy is out of date, and I have the impression that support for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?
It's definitely worth to integrate this into Debian. If it's possible to
include this in wheezy is up to the release team. IMHO the easiest way
to track such changes is to send individual bug reports and to send a
mail explaining how they depend on each other afterwards to all the
reports (with links to all reports). Another possible way to track this
is to add a meta-bug blocked by all the other bugs.
If you have commit access (you can request it if you don't have it yet)
to the d-i repository you can also commit your changes to a feature
branch like people/miquels/imsm.
Gaudenz
--
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
~ Samuel Beckett ~
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