Feature changed by: Michael Löffler (michl19) Feature #305883, revision 8 Title: Install and boot support for MDRAID External Metadata (ISW) openSUSE-11.2: Evaluation Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Marc Ruehrschneck (macrue) - Partner organization: Intel + Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Support for MDRAID External Metadata ISW for raid 0, 1, 10 and 5, 6 (??). User should have a choice between DMRAID and MDRAID or have no DMRAID support. This feature request has three aspects: 1) Detection of RAID arrays and platform capabilities Currently SLES can detect raid arrays but it does not confirm whether raid is enabled in the platform BIOS. If raid support has been disabled in the BIOS then arrays should not be presented as candidates for installation Currently "mdadm --detail-platform -e imsm" could be used for this detection as it returns true when the platform has Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager support enabled. 2) Creating an initrd with support for assembling ISW raid arrays This has dependencies on how FR#781 is resolved (mdp versus kpartx) and needs support for handling the metadata dirty bit FR#782. At a minimum it involves adding something akin to the following commands to the initrd init script: ... mdadm -Asc mdadm.conf mount /dev/md/Volume0p1 /sysroot mdmon --switch-root /sysroot /dev/md/imsm0 ... 3) Installing the bootloader on a RAID device Fortunately the version of grub in SLES11-beta6 seems to already understand/expect partitionable md arrays as the following grub commands: root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) ...ends in a failure to access /dev/md/Volume0p1. So this may add weight to the mdp case for FR#781. Adding a link to the kpartx partition, that SLES11 currently creates, allows this to grub installation to complete successfully. However, this required hand editing of /boot/grub/device.map so the final solution will probably require a utility to dump the grub device to raid device mapping, or the restriction that the raid device must be grub device (hd0). Business case (Partner benefit): - Intel: Enable feature parity with the Windows IMSM stack for Linux - customers + openSUSE.org: Enable feature parity with the Windows IMSM stack for + Linux customers -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/305883