On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:58 AM, fibreraid@gmail.com [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi Neil,

I may have spoken a bit too soon. It seems that while the md's are
coming up successfully, on occasion, hot-spares are not coming up
associated with their proper md's. As a result, what was a RAID 5 md
with one hot-spare will on occasion come up as a RAID 5 md with no
hot-spare.

Any ideas on this one?

Is this new behavior only seen with 3.1.3, i.e when it worked with
3.1.2 did the hot spares always arrive correctly?  I suspect this is a
result of the new behavior of -I to not add devices to a running array
without the -R parameter, but you don't want to make this the default
for udev otherwise your arrays will always come up degraded.

We could allow disks to be added to active non-degraded arrays, but
that still has the possibility of letting a stale device take the
place of a fresh hot spare (the whole point of changing the behavior
in the first place).  So as far as I can see we need to query the
other disks in the active array and permit the disk to be re-added to
an active array when it is demonstrably a hot spare (or -R is
specified).

--
Dan