*** Announcement: dmraid 1.0.0-rc3 ***

               *** Announcement: dmraid 1.0.0-rc3 ***

dmraid 1.0.0-rc3 is available at
http://people.redhat.com:/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/ in source, source rpm and i386 rpm.

dmraid (Device-Mapper Raid tool) discovers, [de]activates and displays properties of software RAID sets (ie. ATARAID) and contained DOS partitions using the device-mapper runtime of the 2.6 kernel.

The following ATARAID types are supported on Linux 2.6:

Highpoint HPT37X
Highpoint HPT45X
Intel Software RAID
Promise FastTrack
Silicon Image Medley

This ATARAID type is only basically supported in this version (I need better metadata format specs; please help):
LSI Logic MegaRAID

Please provide insight to support those metadata formats completely.

Thanks.

See files README and CHANGELOG, which come with the source tarball for prerequisites to run this software, further instructions on installing and using dmraid!

CHANGELOG is contained below for your convenience as well.

Call for testers:
-----------------

I need testers with the above ATARAID types, to check that the mapping created by this tool is correct (see options "-t -ay") and access to the ATARAID data is proper.

You can activate your ATARAID sets without danger of overwriting your metadata, because dmraid accesses it read-only unless you use option -E with -r in order to erase ATARAID metadata (see 'man dmraid')!

This is a release candidate version so you want to have backups of your valuable data *and* you want to test accessing your data read-only first in order to make sure that the mapping is correct before you go for read-write access.

The author is reachable at <[email protected]>.

For test results, mapping information, discussions, questions, patches, enhancement requests and the like, please subscribe and mail to <[email protected]>.

--

Regards,
Heinz -- The LVM Guy --

CHANGELOG:
---------

Changelog from dmraid 1.0.0-rc2 to 1.0.0-rc3 2004.08.18

FIXES:
------
o HPT37X mapping on first disk of set
o dietlibc sscanf() use prevented activation
o le*_to_cpu() for certain glibc environments (Luca Berra)
o sysfs discovery (Luca Berra)
o permissions to write on binary, which is needed by newer strip versions (Luca Berra)
o SCSI serial number string length bug
o valgrinded memory leaks
o updated design document
o comments

FEATURES:
---------
o added basic support for activation of LSI Logic MegaRAID/MegaIDE; more reengineering of the metadata needed!
o root check using certain options (eg, activation of RAID sets)
o implemented locking abstraction
o implemented writing device metadata offsets with "-r[D/E]" for ease of manual restore
o file based locking to avoid parallel tool runs competing
with each other for the same resources
o streamlined library context
o implemented access functions for library context
o streamlined RAID set consistency checks
o implemented log function and removed macros to shrink binary size further
o removed superfluous disk geometry code
o cleaned up metadata.c collapsing free_*() functions
o slimmed down minimal binary (configure option DMRAID_MINI
for early boot environment)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Heinz Mauelshagen Red Hat GmbH
Consulting Development Engineer Am Sonnenhang 11
56242 Marienrachdorf Germany
[email protected] +49 2626 141200

                                                       FAX 924446

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Heinz,

I'd really like to see dmraid be able to support Linux software RAID (md driver) as well, at least for RAID-0/1. On my newer systems, using udev, mdadm is difficult to use to discover arrays because it requires that the /dev/md? devices already exist before they have been activated :-)

I've thought (and talked to Neil B.) about extending the MD driver to have ways around this problem, but for my needs (RAID-1), using the DM raid 1 target would suffice, and if dmraid could discover and activate my arrays I'd be all set.