Hi, I am planning to change how we support BIOS RAID (sometimes also called Firmware or Fake RAID) in the installer in the future. I plan to go through the official Fedora change process for Fedora 38, but I'd like to get some feedback first.
We are currently using dmraid to support these types of RAIDs in blivet[1] (storage library the Anaconda installer uses) and we would like to replace it with mdadm. The main reason is that dmraid is no longer actively maintained, but it will also mean one less dependency for the installer (we use mdadm for the software RAID support) and one less service running during boot (dmraid-activation.service). The potential issue here is that mdadm doesn't support all BIOS RAID types. mdadm supports only Common RAID Disk Data Format standard[2] (DDF) and Intel Matrix Storage Technology (IMSM) so by switching to mdadm we would remove support for some of the older formats that existed before DDF was standardized. I am not sure how many people are still using these older RAIDs and the main reason for sending this email is to find out. So if you are using a BIOS RAID on your system, can you check what kind? You can find out simply by checking the filesystem type on the underlying disk(s) reported by for example `lsblk -f`. Types supported by mdadm are "ddf_raid_member" and "isw_raid_member". Types supported only by dmraid are "adaptec_raid_member", "hpt***_raid_member", "jmicron_raid_member", "lsi_mega_raid_member", "nvidia_raid_member", "silicon_medley_raid_member" and "via_raid_member". So if you have one of the latter ones and you'd be impacted by this change, please let me know so we can reconsider this change. Note that this would affect only the installation process, I know some external and NAS drives use BIOS RAID and these won't be affected, dmraid is not being removed from the repositories (at least I am not aware of this right now, some distributions are already planning to remove dmraid completely). [1] https://github.com/storaged-project/blivet [2] https://www.snia.org/tech_activities/standards/curr_standards/ddf Regards Vojtech Trefny vtre...@redhat.com _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
