Re: New mailing list for 2.6 Medley RAID (Silicon Image 3112 etc.) BIOS RAID development

On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 12:01:55PM +0000, Thomas Horsten wrote:

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

quoted

quoted

The reason I insist on autodetection is that I think it's important that if
the BIOS will reckognise the drive without additional intervention, so will
Linux. This will make the entry route for newbies much simpler.

do you call running devicemapper tools from the initrd autodetection ?

Probably not. I am working with several ways of doing it, and that's why I
wanted to have a discussion about this.

Ideally I'd want something like the MD autodetect code, so that the whole
thing can be set up by the kernel at boot-time if the necessary drivers
are compiled in (by reading the Medley superblock the same way it's done
for 0xfe partitions).

I (and I suspect a lot of other folks) rather get rid of such autodetect and
move it to userspace. Either via initrd or initramfs.

Having autodetection at kernel level would make it possible to boot from a
kernel on a floppy disk without initrd support, and in general make a
system easier to set up.

initrd/initramfs is increasingly becoming mandatory sort of, and it's
actually easy if not even default to set up. (Eg on Fedora / Red Hat even
just typing make install will auto-create this for you)

But the reason I wanted this discussion is to figure out the best way to
go about it, and if there are some good arguments against autodetecting in
the kernel I'll listen to them.

It doesn't really belong there.