Degraded RAID UI (Re: Server Team 20080812 meeting minutes)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 05:19:32PM -0700, Mathias Gug wrote:
> ==== Boot Support for Degraded RAID ====
> 
> kirkland has been working on adding RAID support to grub-install. His patch is
> waiting for sponsoring. He hopes it will make it for alpha4 scheduled to be
> released on Thursday. If so mathiaz suggested that this new feature should be
> documented in the Release Notes in order to get more testing.
> 
> The last item he's working on is adding a question during the installation on
> whether the system should be set to boot from a degraded array (defaulting to
> No, which matches the current behaviour).

It appears from that if this feature is not enabled, the system will fail
hard to an initramfs shell.  Instead, how about giving the user the option
to continue?

Waiting for root file system...

** WARNING: The root filesystem was found on a degraded RAID array! **

The system may have suffered a hardware fault, such as a disk drive failure.
You may attempt to start the system anyway, or stop now and attempt manual
recovery operations.

If you choose to continue, the system may start normally, but performance
may be degraded, and a further hardware fault could result in permanent data
loss.

If you abort now, you will be provided with a recovery shell.

Do you wish to continue? [y/N]

This should present no more risk than dropping to a shell, and gives the
user the guidance to make an informed decision.

-- 
 - mdz