MD/RAID - Software RAID for Linux

The Md (Multiple Disk)/ RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Devices) driver was been part of Linux for a while.

The 2.2 series kernels is currently shipping with fairly old code - version 36. Patches are available to update this to version 90 support, which provides bacground rebuild for RAID 1/4/5, from http://people.redhat.com/mingo/raid-patches/ The user level tools are available from http://www.{country}.kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/raid/ where you can also find some old kernel patches.

As of 2.3.99-pre8, the 2.3/2.4 series kernels have MD version 90 functionality, with some improvements.

I have some patches against 2.4.0-test7-pre4. They are:

A: Substantial re-write of raid5 to improve performace. Preliminary data on a 4-drive array has write performance up by a factor of 4, and read performance up by about 30 percent (using bonnie).
Warning: this is still experimental

I have a TODO list which lists some things I would like to work on, or look into.

Last updated 17th August 2000
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