[patch 1998.12.15] (was: Re: Success report: RAID-0,1,4,5 patch , 1998.12.14, 2.0.36/2.1.131-ac9)

[MOLNAR Ingo]

On Mon, 14 Dec 1998, David Harris wrote:

> Only one complaint: Using the  "raidhotadd" command on a md device which is
> in readonly mode still crashes the system. Something should stop the user
> from doing this, either in the kernel ioctl or in the raidtools command.

good point, i have not thought of this. I have just tried this with the
19981214 patch, and my system did not actually crash, it retried to write
the new spare a couple of times then gave up. What were the symptoms on
your system? It really should not have crashed, read-only status can be
considered as a 'media error', which we have to survive always. 

i've fixed this bug at the ioctl level, now there is a new grouping of
'read-write' ioctls, and have released it as the 19981215 patch. (it adds
only this fix)

when a read-only array fails, we still try to write the superblock and
ignore the read-only flag. The reasoning here: marking a failed device as
'bad' is more important than maintaining a user-supplied read-only status.
(we still maintain the read-only status on the MD device level, we just
modify the disk superblocks behind)

-- mingo