Re: Change of policy for future 2.2 driver submissions

[Ingo Molnar]

On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Hubert Mantel wrote:

> Right, but now there is a problem: Software RAID. The RAID code of
> 2.4.0 is not backwards compatible to the one in 2.2.18; if somebody
> has used 2.4.0 on softraid and discovers some problem, he can not
> switch back to some official 2.2 kernel. [...]

that is simply not true - at least for the RAID0 and LINEAR mdtools
arrays. You can start up 'new' RAID devices via mdtools just fine, even if
these new devices have RAID-superblocks. (because those superblocks are at
the end of the device, and ext2fs knows the true size of the filesystem.)

you have to keep two sets of configuration files (/etc/raidtab and
/etc/mdtab), but that is not new nor unreasonable. The tools do not clash
either.

[ the only category impacted are people who are still using the
RAID1/RAID4,5 code in the stock 2.2 kernel - i do believe the number of
these people is very low, and they should imminently upgrade to the 0.90
driver anyway, for stability and data integrity reasons. ]

	Ingo