Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261462AbVE2Wx3 (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 May 2005 18:53:29 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261464AbVE2Wx3 (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 May 2005 18:53:29 -0400 Received: from artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz ([195.113.31.125]:9898 "EHLO artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261462AbVE2Wx0 (ORCPT ); Sun, 29 May 2005 18:53:26 -0400 Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 00:53:25 +0200 (CEST) From: Mikulas Patocka To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: RAID-5 design bug (or misfeature) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 898 Lines: 21 Hi RAID-5 has rather serious design bug --- when two disks become temporarily inaccessible (as it happened to me because of high temperature in server room), linux writes information about these errors to the remaining disks and when failed disks are on line again, RAID-5 won't ever be accessible. RAID-HOWTO lists some actions that can be done in this case, but none of them can be done if root filesystem is on RAID --- the machine just won't boot. I think Linux should stop accessing all disks in RAID-5 array if two disks fail and not write "this array is dead" in superblocks on remaining disks, efficiently destroying the whole array. Mikulas - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/