[ILUG] Booting a broken raid array

[Pádraig Brady]

Kenn Humborg wrote:
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ilug-bounces at linux.ie [mailto:ilug-bounces at linux.ie]On Behalf Of
>> Pádraig Brady
>> Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 2:18 PM
>> To: Kenn Humborg
>> Cc: ilug at linux.ie
>> Subject: Re: [ILUG] Booting a broken raid array
>>
>>
>> Kenn Humborg wrote:
>>> I'd say get a server with a real hardware RAID setup, like a Dell PERC.
>> Hardware RAID is worse than software RAID IMHO,
>> as it's often buggy and just adds extra dependencies.
>> http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/008696.html
> 
> I haven't had any issue like that with the Dell controllers,
> but my experience hasn't been that extensive.  I've never
> used any other vendors' kits and I wouldn't trust anything
> cobbled together from multiple vendors.

Just to be explicit, there are the software dependencies
as well as the hardware dependencies to consider.
Vendors tend to differentiate themselves on hardware RAID
and thus tend to require non standard drivers.

> 
>> Software RAID as well as being simpler, cheaper and
>> easy to upgrade can also have functional advantages:
>> http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z
> 
> Interesting!  How do Sun handle the boot-from-software-RAID
> problem?  They probably have much smarter boot loaders.

Note grub can support software RAID since 1.95:
http://grub.enbug.org/LVMandRAID
but I'm not sure when that will (ever) be deployed.

cheers,
Pádraig.