ANNOUNCE-2.3

Subject:  ANNOUNCE: mdadm 2.3 - A tool for managing Soft RAID under Linux

I am pleased to announce the availability of
   mdadm version 2.3

It is available at the usual places:
   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/
and
   http://www.{countrycode}.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/

mdadm is a tool for creating, managing and monitoring
device arrays using the "md" driver in Linux, also
known as Software RAID arrays.

Release 2.3 fixes an assortment of bugs including the "--assemble --scan"
crash.  It also makes mdadm better at handling very large arrays.
Finally, it adds some functionality to support some pending kernel
features such as raid5 reshaping.

Changelog Entries:
    -   Try /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf if /etc/mdadm.conf doesn't exist.
	This provided compatability for Debian.
    -   Fixed for version-1 superblock:
	 report chunksize for raid6 and raid10
	 make sure device size used is a multiple of chunksize
    -   Fix "--assemble --scan" crash.
    -   Fix completely failure to create array on ppc64
    -   Fix memcmp in place of memcpy
    -   A few minor improvements to online help
    -   Clean up usage of 'long long' for used-size of devices, so
	that it is possible to create a raid1 of 7TB devices!
    -   Make internal bitmaps work on 7TB raid1 arrays.
    -   Provide error message if --examine doesn't find any superblock.
    -   Report 'reshape' status in --examine - this depends on kernel
	patches that are not yet finalised.
    -   Report bitmap status in --detail and --examine
    -   Default to v1 superblocks instead of v0.90 if the array
	is too big for 0.90 to handle.
    -   Sort the output of "mdadm --detail --scan" so that it is
	in a suitable order for assembling arrays. i.e. components come
	before an array that they are part of.
    -   Print size of large reiserfs array properly went warning of
        possible confilcts.

Development of mdadm is sponsored by
 SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

NeilBrown  2nd February 2006