Re: SW Raid doesn't play nice with devfs?

On Sunday September 8, marc_news@merlins.org wrote:

That said, the problem occurs both with the kernel autorun and raidstart:
when I load the qla1280 module, the drives get detected, md wakes up and
tries to create md3 since the partitions have type 0xfd, and fails in the
same way:
(...)
kernel:  /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target13/lun0: p1
kernel: SCSI device sdl: 354600001 512-byte hdwr sectors
kernel:  /dev/scsi/host3/bus0/target14/lun0: p1
kernel:  [events: 00000002]
kernel: md: could not lock sdm1, zero-size? Marking faulty.
(...)

I'm not sure what exactly is going on here, but it isn't regular
auto-detect. That *only* happens at boot time.  Never after module
load.

Is the kernel autorun code going to be fixed too or will I need to use mdadm
for the forseable future?

I use and recommend mdadm to all non-root devices.  For a raid
containing the root filesystem I use kernel parameters:
   md=0,/dev/xxxx,/dev/yyyy

though in 2.6, I suspect that initramfs will mean that mdadm is the
best choice for that too.  Don't do in kernel-space that which can
effectively and efficiently be done in user-space.

NeilBrown