Subject:  ANNOUNCE: mdadm 1.8.1 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux - DEVELOPMENT version


I am pleased to announce the availability of 
   mdadm version 1.8.1
It is available at
   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/
and
   http://www.{countrycode}.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/

as a source tar-ball and (at the first site) as an SRPM, and as an RPM for i386.

This is a "development" release of mdadm.  It should *not* be
considered stable and should be used primarily for testing.
The current "stable" version is 1.8.0.

Release 1.8.1 supports different styles of superblocks (aka RAID metadata).
Two formats are currently supported 
   version 0.90.0 - the traditional Linux RAID superblock
   version 1 - a new superblock which less useless information and some more 
        flexability.

Version 1 supports more than 28 devices in an array, and RAID1 and greater over
devices larger than 2TB (though a 2TB RAID1 would take forever to resync!).

mdadm 1.8.1 takes a different approach to creating arrays than
previous versions, though this is largely transparent.  Instead of
giving the devices to the kernel and letting it "create" the array and
write out initial superblocks, mdadm 1.8.1 writes out the initial
superblocks itself, thus creating the array, and then asks the kernel
to assemble that array.

Version 1 superblocks requires 2.6.10 or a recent 2.6.10-rc snapshot.

Enhancements that are expected before this becomes 2.0.0:

 - mdassemble currently doesn't compile
 - version 1 superblocks have room for a label, which currently isn't used.
   Setting the label, and assembling arrays by label will be supported.
   A label like "$HOSTNAME-root" could be the standard label for the device 
   containing the root filesystem for $HOSTNAME.


Development of mdadm is sponsored by CSE@UNSW: 
  The School of Computer Science and Engineering
at
  The University of New South Wales

NeilBrown  05 November 2004

