RAID support

  • KOPRajs Easiest way to find out is try to push a PR and see if they accept it. Some users probably also want some more device mapper modules, like dm-integrity if you care about bit rot and data loss, to be turned on.

    I would also guess there are init scripts changes to assemble the raid at boot. The other catch which I assume hasn't changed is the boot device can't be part of the RAID or it would have to be only in a mirror, that was a GRUB limitation and I have to imagine that u-boot, Raspberry Pi's bootloader, and others have similar limitations. Not sure if folks use eMMC/SD/USB drive as a boot, and then have 2 or more additional devices attached to do some sort of mirror or RAID 5-6.

  • Well, for me it would be sufficient to have the ability to access data on the RAID array. I don't need to boot from the RAID, nor to have the /storage on the RAID. I would just love to have my music, movies, photos and games collections on a RAID storage in my HTPC. One fast device for the boot and the storage partitions and two big disks in a RAID1 array for media files.

  • Frankly, raid isn't going to help you with data loss. RAID is not a backup,

    That's totally not true. I had two HDDs with mirroring raid configured in the past, where the primary HDD died, and I spent about just 5 minutes recovering the whole system (swapping the dead HDD, making the second HDD the primary).

  • There are lots of different software RAID options. If we add one type for one (small) group of users we'll have to add more types to appease all the other (small) user groups that want something different. Then if we add 'only' the kernel options users will whinge about not having all the userspace tools that are needed to safely use and manage all the different RAID types and use-cases that come with the topic. This compounds the opportunity for complex support issues and increases the software maintenance burden and image bloat (the death of a thousand cuts) for the distro; so the project has always (since early OE days) resisted adding RAID support. Fortunately the distro is open-source with an excellent and simple build-system, and you are welcome to modify it as you like.