[Bug 942106] Re: software raid doesn't assemble before mount on boot

[Mark C Davis]

I have had similar failure on all versions of precise on my Asus M4A785
with AMD X4 9850 with one drive on SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II
Controller  Boot from IDE drive and 6 SATA drives in raid5.  Every boot
failed with initramfs stop into busybox.  Installing precise.proposed
version of mdadm version 3.2.5-1ubuntu0.1 mentioned above fixed the
problem with two successful boots with no problem.

mark at server7:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Release:	12.04
Codename:	precise

mark at server7:~$ mdadm -V
mdadm - v3.2.5 - 18th May 2012

mark at server7:~$ cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] 
md0 : active raid5 sdk[2] sdi[0] sdj[1] sdd[5] sdc[6](S) sdb[3]
      7814051840 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/5] [UUUUU]
      
unused devices: <none>

Please ship it!

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/942106

Title:
  software raid doesn't assemble before mount on boot

Status in “mdadm” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “update-manager” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “mdadm” source package in Precise:
  Fix Committed
Status in “update-manager” source package in Precise:
  Fix Released
Status in “mdadm” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Released
Status in “update-manager” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  [IMPACT]

   * Due to small time-outs udev may not detect all attached drives
  quick enough to be processed and assembled into a RAID array

  * This results in dropping a user into an initramfs shell or if
  BOOT_DEGRADED is set the boot will proceed degrading RAID unnecessary

   * The fix is to include wait_for_udev call to give udev more time to
  find the drives which are part of RAID

  [TESTCASE]

   * Install RAID preferably with a "slow" interface, e.g. RAID1 with
  one drive on external USB

  * Reboot multiple times and notice that sometimes boot fails

  * Upgrade to the -proposed package

  * Reboot multiple times and notice that boot fail less often

  [Regression Potential]

  * boot speed is decreased due to the nature of the fix, i.e. adding a physical delay
  * Multiple reports in this bug and on the ubuntuforums reporting that this change "fixes" the boot issue for the users

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