| Subject: ANNOUNCE: mdadm 3.3 - A tools for managing md Soft RAID under Linux |
| |
| I am pleased to announce the availability of |
| mdadm version 3.3 |
| |
| It is available at the usual places: |
| http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/raid/mdadm/ |
| and via git at |
| git://github.com/neilbrown/mdadm |
| git://neil.brown.name/mdadm |
| http://git.neil.brown.name/git/mdadm |
| |
| This is a major new release so don't be too surprised if there are a |
| few issues. If I hear about them they will be fixed in 3.3.1. |
| git log reports nearly 500 changes since 3.2.6 so I won't list them |
| all. |
| |
| Some highlights are: |
| |
| - Some array reshapes can proceed without needing backup file. |
| This is done by changing the 'data_offset' so we never need to write |
| any data back over where it was before. If there is no "head space" |
| or "tail space" to allow data_offset to change, the old mechanism |
| with a backup file can still be used. |
| - RAID10 arrays can be reshaped to change the number of devices, |
| change the chunk size, or change the layout between 'near' |
| and 'offset'. |
| This will always change data_offset, and will fail if there is no |
| room for data_offset to be moved. |
| - "--assemble --update=metadata" can convert a 0.90 array to a 1.0 array. |
| - bad-block-logs are supported (but not heavily tested yet) |
| - "--assemble --update=revert-reshape" can be used to undo a reshape |
| that has just been started but isn't really wanted. This is very |
| new and while it passes basic tests it cannot be guaranteed. |
| - improved locking between --incremental and --assemble |
| - uses systemd to run "mdmon" if systemd is configured to do that. |
| - kernel names of md devices can be non-numeric. e.g. "md_home" rather than |
| "md0". This will probably confuse lots of other tools, so you need to |
| echo CREATE names=yes >> /etc/mdadm.conf |
| or the feature will not be used. (you also need a reasonably new kernel). |
| - "--stop" can be given a kernel name instead of a device name. i.e |
| mdadm --stop md4 |
| will work even if /dev/md4 doesn't exist. |
| - "--detail --export" has some information about the devices in the array |
| - --dump and --restore can be used to backup and restore the metadata on an |
| array. |
| - Hot-replace is supported with |
| mdadm /dev/mdX --replace /dev/foo |
| and |
| mdadm /dev/mdX --replace /dev/foo --with /dev/bar |
| - Config file can be a directory in which case all "*.conf" files are |
| read in lexical order. |
| Default is to read /etc/mdadm.conf and then /etc/mdadm.conf.d |
| Thus |
| echo CREATE name=yes > /etc/mdadm.conf.d/names.conf |
| will also enable the use of named md devices. |
| |
| - Lots of improvements to DDF support including adding support for |
| RAID10 (thanks Martin Wilck). |
| |
| and lots of bugfixes and other little changes. |
| |
| NeilBrown 3rd September 2013 |