Re: partitions for RAID volumes?

[Neil Brown]

On Wednesday February 21, [e-mail] wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is there any chance that RAID volumes would support partitions like the
> hard-disk driver in the future? 

Yep.
See: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/patches/linux/2.4.2-pre4/

You would need patches H,I,N,O,P,Q,R,  and you should consider this a
very early release, but it works for me.
It uses a second major device number for partitioned md arrays. You
can only partition the first 16 arrays (md0 - md15) and only have 15
partitions per array.  It wont work well for raid5, but for raid1
(which is what I particularly want) or raid0 it should be fine.

Using this, I can RAID1 hda and hdc together as md0 == mda and then
partition it up as mda1 (root) mda2 (swap) mda3 (other).  And if I
have too, I can boot off either drive individually with any raid
happening.

Lilo needs to be hacked a bit to do the right thing, and I have got a
major number officially allocated from lanana, but as I said, this is
a very early release.

NeilBrown