On Aug 1, 2006, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> wrote:But it's MY system. I don't have to anything. More to the point, growing root while the system is running is done a lot less than booting. In general the root f/s has very little in it, and that's a good thing.
I rarely think you are totally wrong about anything RAID, but I do
believe you have missed the point of autodetect. It is intended to
work as it does now, building the array without depending on some user
level functionality.
Well, it clearly depends on at least some user level functionality
(the ioctl that triggers autodetect). Going from that to a
full-fledged mdadm doesn't sound like such a big deal to me.
I don't personally see the value of autodetect for putting together
the huge number of drives people configure. I see this as a way to
improve boot reliability, if someone needs 64 drives for root and
boot, they need to read a few essays on filesystem
configuration. However, I'm aware that there are some really bizarre
special cases out there.
There's LVM. If you have to keep root out of the VG just because
people say so, you lose lots of benefits from LVM, such as being able
to grow root with the system running, take snapshots of root, etc.