Installing on software RAID5?

[robin-lists at robinbowes.com]

Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> Hi Robin,
> 
>> I plan to create RAID1 mirrors for /boot and swap and create all
>> other partitions as RAID5 arrays.
> 
> RAID1 for swap? Iirc swap will do striping if you use multiple
> partitions (on different disks?) with the same priority. So for swap
> you don't even need to setup RAID0. You might want to use RAID0 for
> /tmp and /var/tmp however.

General concensus on the linux raid list is that striping swap is bad
because the whole machine will die if one of the disks containing a swap
partition fails. Hence the RAID1 for swap.

Actually, I intend to try putting swap on RAID10 by creating 3 mirrored
pairs and striping all three together. This could be considered to be
overkill!

I'm not too concerned about performance for /tmp and /var/tmp so I'll
probably stick with them on RAID5, although now you've mentioned it I may
consider RAID10 the same as the swap partition.

>> Is it possible to configure software RAID at install time with Core
>> 2 or will I need to create the arrays before I install?
> 
> Not sure if the installer has improved in this respect since RHL 7.2,
> but you could not set chunk size then. If not you might want to setup
> your RAID partitions before doing the actual installation.

Can this be done from a terminal window whilst the installer is running,
i.e. do the raid tools come on the Fedora install disk(s)? Or do I need to
boot from another distro CD, e.g. knoppix or Gentoo and create the
partitions that way?

Do you have any recommendations regarding chunk size?

Thanks,

R.