Linux Software RAID

07 June 2004, 13:27 UTC

Since sometime in September 2001 I have been the "offical maintainer" of Software RAID aka the MD driver in the Linux kernel (for whatever that is worth).

My particuarly interest in it is to have working RAID5 and RAID1 code so that my servers have fairly reliable data storage. I try to keep the other personalities working (RAID0, Linear, Multipath, RAID6) but do not use them much if at all. In particular I have little interest in multipath. I'm not even sure that 'md' is the right place for multipath support. But maybe it is.

There is a related but separate set of code known as "DM" for "Device Mapper". I do not maintain it or know much about it.

It has been suggested that md and dm should merge. This is probably a good idea, but no-one seem actually motivated to do it. Maybe one day someone will. Or maybe one day dm will include all the functionality of md and I can start using it and give up on md. Only time will tell.

I have written a tool for management of MD arrays. You can see my mdadm page for more details.

Patches

I don't keep a separate set of raid patches. I just keep a bunch of current patches which might be for RAID, and might be for NFS, or even something else. You can find them at http://neilb.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/patches/linux-devel/.

News

[blog [location/] [selectraid] ]

Random thoughts

The following items are various random thoughts about the MD driver, what needs to be fixed and what enhancements might be useful.

[blog]




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