8.04-1 won't boot from degraded raid

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Kees Cook <kees at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 12:44:36PM -0400, David Miller wrote:
>> Now having said that I'm glad that this problem is finally getting some
>> attention.  But for it to be a viable option here it has to be in a LTS
>> release so what are the chances of this getting back ported to Hardy once
>> it's released in Intrepid?  Considering that the LTS server users are the
>> Ubuntu market segment that will benefit from this the most from this and are
>> the ones who are willing to pay for support contracts.

Just to expand a bit on what Kees said to this, David (et al)...

We absolutely must first prove that the functionality in Intrepid does
what would be required (by you and some critical mass of others)
before we begin to discuss a backport to Hardy Long-Term-Support.

Among this thread, and the several others bugs on this topic (various
aspects of booting degraded RAID), it seems that there are a number of
different (perhaps even conflicting) expectations on this topic.

At the very least, Kees and I have tested the patches to mdadm, grub,
and initramfs.  Both of us run RAID1's on Ubuntu on our own personal
servers.  And both of us were as frustrated as you when we learned
that Ubuntu did not handle a degraded RAID gracefully.

I politely disagree with Michael's calling it "broken"...  To me,
"broken" would equate to something more along Soren's scenario of
corrupted data, or a destroyed system.  We can quibble over
terminology, but there are certainly valid bugs in Launchpad about the
problem, and Ubuntu's behavior prior to my patches was absolutely
sub-optimal, and lacking some highly sought-after features.

One of the absolute prerequisites before myself (and possibly others)
invest the significant effort required to backport and test the
functionality, and then begin trying to convince the powers-that-be to
allow the Stable-Release-Update, is that you and others test the
functionality as it stands in Intrepid and report back that it behaves
as you'd want it to in Hardy.  Even then, I cannot make any guarantees
at this point, but we will need that data to support the request to
deliver the functionality back to a previously released version of
Ubuntu.

Thanks,
:-Dustin