Subject:  ANNOUNCE: mdadm 2.4 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux

I am pleased to announce the availability of
   mdadm version 2.4

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 2.4 primarily adds support for increasing the number of
devices in a RAID5 array, which requires 2.6.17 (or some -rc or -mm
prerelease).
It also includes a number of minor functionality enhancements and
documentation updates.

Changelog Entries:
    -   Rewrite 'reshape' support including performing a backup
	of the critical region for a raid5 growth, and restoring that
	backup after a crash.
    -   Put a 'canary' at each end of the backup so a corruption
	can be more easily detected.
    -   Remove useless 'ident' arguement from ->getinfo_super method.
    -   Support --backup-file for backing-up critical section during
        growth.
    -   Erase old superblocks (of different versions) when creating new
        array.
    -   Allow --monitor to work with arrays with >28 devices
    -   Report reshape information in --detail
    -   Handle symlinks in /dev better
    -   Fix mess in --detail output which a device is missing.
    -   Manpage tidyup
    -   Support 'bitmap=' in mdadm.conf for auto-assembling arrays with
	write-intent bitmaps in separate files.
    -   Updates to md.4 man page including section on RESTRIPING and SYSFS

Development of mdadm is sponsored by
 SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

NeilBrown  30th March 2006

