I'm not sure if there is a political reason why the "alpha" raid is not in the kernel. It's been available since 2.0.30 as a patch (well over a year I think).
The last I'd read was that the Kernel team did not want any changes that required "Tool" changes as well. So if the new raid would run with the old tools, they would probably add it.
I was trying to use the built in kernel raid, but no one has been maintaining it to match the lastest memory and fs changes. I found 4 or 5 holes in it when I was first trying. Mostly it meant no kernel rebuilds, so you sit with file systems offline for 20+ hours while you rebuild a large raid5 array. And it did not have a decent "degraded" mode for raid 5 either, where you could continue running with one drive removed.
All in all, the newer raid has been much more stable. Other than a lack of detailed documentation, the newer raid tools generally work better.
Clay
-----Original Message-----
From: xrr [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Saturday, October 02, 1999 1:07 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Prob with RAID1 - RedHat 6.0 - Kernel 2.2.12
I really feel that you have to get into the sources of the raid softwares
and patches to see what the
real functionalities of this stuff are ! Well, I'll probably do it but I
feel that a lot of people out there are willing to use
software raid "out of the box" and wont go through all this trouble...
Having red the old FAQ, it seems that the old version of the raid was much
more accessible and well documented...
Well, I suppose it was less efficient than the actual one.
I think the nice work of the people working on this project is partly
spoiled because of the lack of documentation
and of a descent distribution (the last beta version are dated 11-07-1997 !
and tens of alpha verision are available since...)
Is there a political problem with the kernel team ?
At 12:45 02/10/99 -0700, Jones, Clay wrote:
>It won't change until Linus and the rest of the kernel team decide to add
>the new raid to relesed kernels. I know when I first started looking into
>raid, I'd heard all of the autodiscover stuff for over a year, and just
>naturally assumed that ANY 2.2 kernel would already have all of that in it.
>
>Clay
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tomas Fasth [<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>Sent: Saturday, October 02, 1999 11:43 AM
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: Prob with RAID1 - RedHat 6.0 - Kernel 2.2.12
>
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > Hi all !
> >
> > I'm having a problem configuring RAID1.
>
>(Sic) I wonder how much time people out there are spending because of
>this seemingly never ending confusion about current dists versus
>latest kernels versus alpha raid patches versus two different raid
>tool chains kind of issue. You will easily end up with the wrong mix.
>This should be so simple, yet it continues to be confusing. Will it
>ever change?
>
><tomas/>
