The array is now surviving a reboot without dropping into a resync
when we start back up.

However, the external bitmap is not getting recreated. My mdadm.conf
looks like this:

ARRAY /dev/md/0 metadata=imsm UUID=30223250:76fd248b:50280919:0836b7f0
ARRAY /dev/md/127 container=30223250:76fd248b:50280919:0836b7f0
member=0 bitmap=/boot/md/127-RAID5-bitmap
UUID=8a4ae452:da1e7832:70ecf895:eb58229c

The /boot partition is being mounted but may not be mounted at the
time the array is started. Not finding any error messages in logs
regarding the bitmap. The help is much appreciated.

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 6:23 PM, Randy Terbush [off-list ref] wrote:

Update on progress....

I have managed to hack together a dracut created initramfs that has me
able to boot and has resolved all boot issues. Will let this thing
have a few hours of resyncing and see if external bitmap comes back
and how it handles the reboot.

Thanks again for the assistance.

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:25 PM, Randy Terbush [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Thanks Dan, a few more steps forward here. I suspect I know the
answer, but will see what you suggest.

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Dan Williams [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

This shows that Gentoo is most likely not including mdmon in their initramfs
environment.  mdadm assembles the array readonly, but then mdmon is required
to mark the array writable.

Looks like you are correct and current installation packages on Gentoo
have apparently not dealt with these changes. mdmon is not getting
started and is not being attempted anywhere.

I don't run an initrd, so attempted to start mdmon after the mdadm -As
runs. This is apparently too early in the process as I get the
following:

* Starting up RAID devices ...
 [ ok ]
mdmon: Neither /var/run nor /lib/init/rw are writable
      cannot create .pid or .sock files.  Aborting
 * Setting up the Logical Volume Manager ...
 [ ok ]
 * Checking local filesystems  ...
HOME-vg0: clean, 13/3276800 files, 256151/52428800 blocks
Warning... fsck.ext4 for device /dev/mapper/vg0-home exited with signal 11.
SVN-vg0: clean, 191/1638400 files, 153087/26214400 blocks
Warning... fsck.ext4 for device /dev/mapper/vg0-svn exited with signal 11.
ARCHIVE-vg0: clean, 12/1638400 files, 152150/26214400 blocks

So it appears the start of mdmon needs to wait until we have a rw
filesystem mounted. Not entirely sure if it is related, but as you can
see above, fsck blows up trying to check the filesystems on this
array. That appears to clear itself up once mdmon is running. After
starting mdmon by hand, the resync begins and I can successfully run
fsck on these partitions.

So looks like I have a chicken and egg problem that I suspect may be
solved by creating an initramfs. I took a quick pass at dracut but
could not convince it to add mdmon. Any hints appreciated as I go back
to dig for more info.

Thanks again for the assistance.

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