dmraid/fakeraid support on ubiquity roadmap

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 09:41:58PM -0800, Richard Bruce wrote:
> I was curious if support for "fakeraid" through dmraid is anywhere on
> the radar for support in ubiquity, possibly in the advanced
> partitioner rewrite?  
> 
> As I'm sure you know, numerous chipsets currently support RAID on the
> motherboard but only with the support of drivers ("fakeraid" as it is
> often referred to).  While linux supports software RAID without
> needing specific chipset support, many users (myself included) run
> Windows on fakeraid setups and would love to be able to have a
> dual-boot setup supported by the installer.  
> 
> There are some very manual ways documented for installing to a
> fakeraid setup using dmraid (see
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto).  It would be awesome
> to see dmraid supported in the installer.  I think this would help
> users with Windows RAID setups use Ubuntu on the same machine.

It ought to be possible in the new partitioner, but not until it's
supported in the alternate install CD (d-i) - they now share most of
their partitioning code so this sort of thing generally only needs to be
done approximately once, modulo UI code. There have been some
half-hearted attempts to write the necessary d-i code but they've never
been completed.

Note that the new partitioner doesn't yet support (other kinds of) RAID;
that is on the roadmap, but post-Feisty. I don't know enough about
dmraid to know whether this would be a blocker.

I would like to see this, but realistically I'm not going to get to it
myself any time soon; the easiest way to help is probably to see
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/InstallerDevelopment and start hacking it into
d-i.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]