Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 117158
(IDE SOFTRAID 2.4ONLY)No support for hpt372a in Fedora Core 2 test 1
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:37 EST
Description of problem: Fedora Core 2 test 1 does not support hpt372a (or any other High-Point) hardware raid. After some research I find that hptraid was removed from the 2.6 kernels in deference to the new md drivers. While switching to software raid would solve my problem for Linux I would loose raid with Windows as this is a multiboot system which isn't really acceptable. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
To put RAID in software is probably based on the poor quality of the "RAID" controllers out there... WinRAID we might call them. Aarchitectually it would be much cleaner to keep everything RAID related to hardware and just present a PV to LVM in linux. A major problem with todays approach is that it could potentially destroy his other OS installs. FC say that the MBR must be initialized. If this is done on mirrored or striped drives, they will be erased and will lead to data loss and reinstall/restore. There should at least be a stronger warning like: We have detected that you are trying to partition drives that might be part of a RAID volume. Please verify the drives detected, especially if you have other operating systems installed on this machine.
I've done a bit more research of the last couple of weeks. Carl-Daniel Hailfinger submitted a patch to the linux-hotplug-devel list that adds support for vendor specific software raid to udev. Unfortunately the patch did not appear in the udev-025 release though it's been available for a couple weeks now, am hoping Greg KH will accept it. One thing I'm not clear on is how udev, a user space raid configuration tool that provides parameters to device-manager, would work with the root partition being on the raid device in question. It seems to me that it would have to be part of the bootloader (grub/lilo/...), though it may be that this would be safe as the bootloader may be using the bios to do the initial load. Haven't really persued this question yet until the patch has been accepted. As for existing FC warning, I thought it was pretty clear but I've a long history in various software dev so I tend to take warnings like that fairly seriously.
The "initrd" ram disk can in theory load any mappings.
dmraid activates mappings for various ATARAID sollutions (incl. Highpoint) in FC3 and newer. Initrd integration is missing so far.
I've been following the development of dmraid since that is what is needed for the bios raid style controllers. Any eta on getting it into initrd?
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
Closing because initramfs integration is happening in FC4/RHEL4.