[mythtv-users] Anyone using RocketRAID?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Sat Mar 15 19:48:37 UTC 2008


On Mar 15, 2008, at 12:50 PM, Boleslaw Ciesielski wrote:

> Brian Wood wrote:
>> On Mar 15, 2008, at 11:38 AM, Frosty wrote:
>>> If a linux software raid setup of 3 drives, raid5, was taken out of
>>> one
>>> machine and placed into another, not identical machine, as long as  
>>> the
>>> kernel supported the new hardware, would it boot?
>>
>> Would it work? Yes.
>>
>> Would it "boot" is another question. Booting from a software RAID
>> partition can be problematical, as you need the kernel loaded to read
>> the RAID array and need the RAID array to load the kernel.
>>
>> Nevertheless booting Linux from a software RAID partition can be  
>> done,
>> but is not suggested in most cases.
>
> AFAIK, you can only boot from software RAID if it is RAID1 (and then
> it's trivial :-).
>
> This restriction applies to /boot only, your root filesystem can be
> anything. Since it is software RAID, you can do things like Intel's
> matrix RAID i.e. designate one partition from a physical drive to
> participate in RAID1 and another from the same drive to participate in
> RAID5 or whatever.

Correct AFAIK. You have to boot from something the kernel understands  
natively how to talk to. Though, as you said, you could boot from a  
small partition with just enough to get the RAID array up and running.

Obviously if you're running RAID1 you could just boot from one of the  
mirrored drives, though you might lose the redundancy for the boot.

beww



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