initramfs/udev/mdadm/lvm2 integration

[Phillip Susi]

Kees Cook wrote:
> So, the question is, which is the "least surprising"?
> 
> a) having the machine spew "I can't mount, here's what you can do...",
>    potentially endangering SLA and/or convenience.
> b) mounting degraded, possibly due to poor timing, potentially endangering
>    partitions and/or data.
> 
> I personally think "b" is more surprising.  I don't think it would be
> hard to add another boot-time flag that means "auto-boot-when-degraded"
> (which could be mentioned in the spew from "a").

I find A to be a lot more surprising.  The whole purpose of having a 
raid 5 setup is so the system will continue to operate just fine in the 
event of a drive failure.  This includes booting up, which is often when 
failures occur.  Sure, needlessly degrading the set isn't good, but the 
system does what it was designed to: keep running.

For the truly pedantic that never want a set degraded without manual 
intervention, or those with funky hardware that takes forever to 
initialize, they can just specify an infinite timeout, but the default 
should be to time out in a reasonable amount of time and continue to boot.