[clue-tech] props to whoever wrote the RAID1 md code in the kernel

[Nate Duehr]

Jim Ockers wrote:

> So the moral of the story is, Linux software RAID-1 mirroring appears to
> be a simple copy of the blocks of data between the devices, so you can
> access your data on either drive without necessarily starting the RAID
> array.  I'm sure there are some drawbacks to this design (such as long
> resync times in the absence of block checksums or something) but it's 
> clear to me that there are some advantages too.

I do think that was a design requirement of it, long ago...

I've also mounted up individual disks from Linux RAID1 and been able to 
"see" the data.

Now if you layer it under/over LVM or something, it gets messier.

Back in the early days, many of us discussed here and on BLUG how much 
of a PITA that GRUB was being, since it couldn't deal with md devices 
natively as a boot device.

You had to tell it, "try from this one first... point at first disk... 
then after a timeout try from this one... point at other disk".  It was 
brain-dead back then.

That changed and GRUB is "md aware" as long as the appropriate Linux 
RAID partition type is set.

I'm old-fashioned, I still like to keep /boot separate from / and 
everything else.. and right up tight against the front of the disks 
physically... more chance I can fix a booting problem that way, or 
recover the data from the other partition.

I dislike that many distros went to one big fat / for their default 
"single-user" setups too...

Nate