A: RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks", and is meant to be a way of creating a fast and reliable disk-drive subsystem out of individual disks.
A: This document is a tutorial/HOWTO/FAQ for users of the Linux MD kernel extension, the associated tools, and their use. The MD extension implements RAID-0 (stripping), RAID-1 (mirroring), RAID-4 and RAID-5 in software. That is, with MD, no special hardware or disk controllers are required to get many of the benefits of RAID. This document is NOT an introduction to RAID; you must find this elsewhere.
A: Striping (RAID-0) and linear concatenation are a part of the stock 2.x series of kernels. This code is of production quality; it is well understood and well maintained. It is being used in some very large USENET news servers. RAID-1, RAID-4 & RAID-5 are not present in the stock kernel; a separate patch needs to be applied to get this functionality. The current snapshots should be considered beta quality; that is, there are no known bugs but there are some rough edges and untested system setups. RAID-1 hot reconstruction has been recently introduced (August 1997) and should be considered alpha quality. RAID-5 hot reconstruction will be alpha quality any day now.
A: Software RAID-0 and linear mode are a stock part of all current Linux kernels. Patches for Software RAID-1,4,5 are available from http://luthien.nuclecu.unam.mx/~miguel/raid. See also the quasi-mirror ftp://linux.kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/raid/ for patches, tools and other goodies.
A:
- Generic RAID overview: http://www.dpt.com/uraiddoc.html.
- General Linux RAID options: http://linas.org/linux/raid.html.
- Linux-RAID mailing list archive: http://www.linuxhq.com/lnxlists.
- Linux Software RAID Home Page: http://luthien.nuclecu.unam.mx/~miguel/raid.
- Linux Software RAID tools: ftp://linux.kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/raid/.
- How to setting up linear/stripped Software RAID: http://www.ssc.com/lg/issue17/raid.html.
- Bootable RAID mini-HOWTO: ftp://ftp.bizsystems.com/pub/raid/bootable-raid.
- Linux RAID-Geschichten: http://www.infodrom.north.de/~joey/Linux/raid/.
A: Linas Vepstas slapped this thing together. However, most of the information, and some of the words were supplied by
- Bradley Ward Allen < ulmo@Q.Net>
- Luca Berra < bluca@comedia.it>
- Brian Candler < B.Candler@pobox.com>
- Bohumil Chalupa < bochal@apollo.karlov.mff.cuni.cz>
- Anton Hristozov < anton@intransco.com>
- Miguel de Icaza < miguel@luthien.nuclecu.unam.mx>
- Ingo Molnar < mingo@pc7537.hil.siemens.at>
- Alvin Oga < alvin@planet.fef.com>
- Gadi Oxman < gadio@netvision.net.il>
- Michael Robinton < michael@bzs.org>
- Martin Schulze < joey@finlandia.infodrom.north.de>
- Geoff Thompson < geofft@cs.waikato.ac.nz>
- Edward Welbon < welbon@bga.com>
- Rod Wilkens < rwilkens@border.net>
- Johan Wiltink < j.m.wiltink@pi.net>
- Leonard N. Zubkoff < lnz@dandelion.com>
- Marc ZYNGIER < zyngier@ufr-info-p7.ibp.fr>
Copyrights
- Copyright (C) 1994-96 Marc ZYNGIER
- Copyright (C) 1997 Gadi Oxman, Ingo Molnar, Miguel de Icaza
- Copyright (C) 1997 Linas Vepstas
- By copyright law, additional copyrights are implicitly held by the contributors listed above.
Thanks all for being there!