[linux-lvm] Bypassing LVM Restrictions - RAID6 With Less Than 5 Disks

[Alex Lieflander]

Hello,

Thank you for your continued work on LVM(2).

I have 4 disks that I’d really like to put into a RAID6. I know about RAID10, but it wouldn’t work well for me for several reasons. Buying another disk would also be a waste of money because I don’t need 3-disks-worth of usable capacity.

I know there was a question regarding this a few years ago, and the consensus was to not natively support that configuration. I can respect that (although I would urge you to reconsider), but I’d still like to do it on my machine.

So far I’ve tried removing the restrictions from the source code and recompiling (I don’t know C, but I’m familiar with general code syntax). I’ve slowly gotten further in the lvconvert process, but there seems to be many similar checks throughout the code.

I’m hoping someone could point me in the right direction towards achieving this goal. If I successfully bypass the user-space tool restrictions, will the rest of LVM likely work with my desired config? Would you be willing to allow the --force option to bypass the restrictions that are not strictly necessary, even at the expense of expected stability? Is there anything else you could suggest?

Thanks,
Alex Lieflander