Subject:  ANNOUNCE: mdadm 2.0 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux

I am (at last) please to announce the availability of
   mdadm version 2.0

It is available at the usual places:
   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/
and
   http://www.{countrycode}.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/

mdadm is a tool for creating, managing and monitoring
device arrays using the "md" driver in Linux, also
known as Software RAID arrays.

Release 2.0 contains a substantial rewrite of various pieces of
functionality, particularly the --create option.  This enables support
for a new style of superblock - the version-1 superblock.
Version-1 can support many more than 28 devices and can be easily
moved between hosts with different endian-ness.
Release 2.0 also contains support for the recent bitmap-intent-logging
which will appear in 2.6.13, and the RAID1 write-behind that will be
available in 2.6.14 (it is currently only in -mm).

This release comes with a test-suite which has been used to verify that
mdadm-2.0 actually works in a number of common scenarios.  Some of the
tests require a bleeding-edge kernel, so don't be surprised if some fail
on kernels prior to 2.6.14.

Being a '.0' release, 2.0 should be treated with some caution.
However I believe it is quite stable and can safely be used on
production systems.

Note that this release is "2.0", not "2.0.0".  I never found a use for
the third number with 1.X.Y, so I dropped it.


Development of mdadm has moved from CSE@UNSW and is now sponsored by
 SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

NeilBrown  26th August 2005

