Hi guys, while experimenting with different raid setups in kvm, i found out our raid support is not really ideal. The status now: - raid hook(inlcuded in mkinitcpio package) does assemble normal raid: but if a drive fails it will fail to boot after it. i'm not 100% sure if it can handle all types of raid levels, partitionable mdp raid doesn't work at all with this hook for sure. - raid-partitions(included in mdadm package) can only assemble 1 raid partition array, which is imho bad you should be able to assemble more than one raid partition device from commandline, if you wish to do so. - UUID is not supported in any of both. Suggestion: Shouldn't we replace all this with 1 hook which can handle all these cases? Now comes the point, to achive this, mdadm will be needed in initramfs which means having a 900k static binary in early boot sequence. (raid-partitions hook already uses this binary) The trick i thought of, would be to generate dynamically a mdadm.conf file from boot commandline, which will use the old syntax of assembling + adding a new syntax for UUID support. Sample code is uploaded here: http://www.archlinux.org/~tpowa/mdadm.hook (not yet tested to boot a system, it's sample code!) Problems: Should this replace an existing hook or a be brand new hook? What should happen to the other hooks, in order to not break a user setup. Doing it with a NEWS Item and a installation message should be fine imho. What do you guys think of this? Thanks for your input. greetings tpowa -- Tobias Powalowski Archlinux Developer & Package Maintainer (tpowa) http://www.archlinux.org tpowa@archlinux.org