[linux-lvm] Adding a mirror after-the-fact
Werner John
john at oswf.de
Wed Aug 15 13:33:37 UTC 2001
Jason Tackaberry writes:
> > You could either mirror the whole disk using MD *without* persistent
> > superblocks
>
> This sounds like the best and most transparent solution. But
> Documentation/md.txt says:
>
> raid level = -1 linear mode
> 0 striped mode
> other modes are only supported with persistant super blocks
>
> So it sounds like this won't work? I'll give it a try and see what
> happens anyway.
It should work, you only need the persistent superblock, if you want to
boot from software RAID.
Here the quote from the HOWTO
>> 3.7. The Persistent Superblock
>>
>> Back in ``The Good Old Days'' (TM), the raidtools would read your
>> /etc/raidtab file, and then initialize the array. However, this would
>> require that the filesystem on which /etc/raidtab resided was mounted.
>> This is unfortunate if you want to boot on a RAID.
>>
>> Also, the old approach led to complications when mounting filesystems
>> RAID devices. They could not be put in the /etc/fstab file as usual,
>> but would have to be mounted from the init-scripts.
>>
>> The persistent superblocks solve these problems. When an array is
>> initialized with the persistent-superblock option in the /etc/raidtab
>> file, a special superblock is written in the beginning of all disks
>> participating in the array. This allows the kernel to read the
>> configuration of RAID devices directly from the disks involved,
>> instead of reading from some configuration file that may not be
>> available at all times.
>>
>> You should however still maintain a consistent /etc/raidtab file,
>> since you may need this file for later reconstruction of the array.
>>
>> The persistent superblock is mandatory if you want auto-detection of
>> your RAID devices upon system boot. This is described in the
>> Autodetection section.
Cheers,
Werner
More information about the linux-lvm
mailing list