Here's one more update of the FAQ. Assuming not too many objections, I'll send it to Jacob, and see if I can contact the list owner and get a footer onto this list. Greg Linux-RAID FAQ Gregory Leblanc gleblanc (at) cu-portland.edu Revision History Revision v0.03 7 August 2000 Revised by: gml Added a request to use a wget type program to fetch the patch. Tried to make things look a little bit better, failed miserably. Revision v0.02 4 August 2000 Revised by: gml Revised a the How do I patch? and the What does /proc/mdstat look like? questions. This is a FAQ for the Linux-RAID mailing list, hosted on vger.rutgers.edu. It's intended as a supplement to the existing Linux-RAID HOWTO, to cover questions that keep occurring on the mailing list. PLEASE read this document before your post to the list. _________________________________________________________________ 1. General 1.1. Where can I find archives for the linux-raid mailing list? 2. Kernel 2.1. I'm running [insert your linux distribution here]. Do I need to patch my kernel to make RAID work? 2.2. How can I tell if I need to patch my kernel? 2.3. Where can I get the latest RAID patches for my kernel? 2.4. How do I apply the patch to a kernel that I just downloaded from ftp.kernel.org? 1. General 1.1. Where can I find archives for the linux-raid mailing list? My favorite archives are at Geocrawler. http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/57/0/ Other archives are available at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-raid&r=1&w=2 Another archive site is http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-raid@vger.rutgers.edu/ 2. Kernel 2.1. I'm running [insert your linux distribution here]. Do I need to patch my kernel to make RAID work? Well, the short answer is, it depends. Distributions that are keeping up to date have the RAID patches included in their kernels. The kernel that RedHat distributes, as do some others. If you download a 2.2.x kernel from ftp.kernel.org, then you will need to patch your kernel. 2.2. How can I tell if I need to patch my kernel? The easiest way is to check what's in /proc/mdstat. Here's a sample from a 2.2.x kernel, with the RAID patches applied. [gleblanc@grego1 gleblanc]$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid5] [translucent] read_ahead not set unused devices: <none> If the contents of /proc/mdstat looks like the above, then you don't need to patch your kernel. Here's a sample from a 2.2.x kernel, without the RAID patches applied. [root@finch root]$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [1 linear] [2 raid0] [3 raid1] [4 raid5] read_ahead not set md0 : inactive md1 : inactive md2 : inactive md3 : inactive If your /proc/mdstat looks like this one, then you need to patch your kernel. 2.3. Where can I get the latest RAID patches for my kernel? The patches for the 2.2.x kernels up to, and including, 2.2.13 are available from ftp.kernel.org. Use the kernel patch that most closely matches your kernel revision. For example, the 2.2.11 patch can also be used on 2.2.12 and 2.2.13. The patches for 2.2.14 and later kernels are at http://people.redhat.com/mingo/raid-patches/. Use the right patch for your kernel, these patches haven't worked on other kernel revisions yet. Please use something like wget/curl/lftp to retrieve this patch, as it's easier on the server than using a client like Netscape. Downloading patches with Lynx has been unsuccessful for me; wget may be the easiest way. 2.4. How do I apply the patch to a kernel that I just downloaded from ftp.kernel.org? First, unpack the kernel into some directory, generally people use /usr/src/linux. Change to this directory, and type patch -p1 < /path/to/raid-version.patch. On my RedHat 6.2 system, I decompressed the 2.2.16 kernel into /usr/src/linux-2.2.16. From /usr/src/linux-2.2.16, I type in patch -p1 < /home/gleblanc/raid-2.2.16-A0. Then I rebuild the kernel using make menuconfig and related builds.