Package: debian-installer Severity: normal A recent (some time in the last 5 years) feature of Linux software RAID is a "write intent bitmap". The purpose of this is that before writing to a section of disk the bitmap is altered to mark it as dirty. Then if the machine experiences a power failure or other catastrophic event then when rebooted it will know that the section referenced by that bit is dirty.
Thus on reboot after a serious failure small amounts of data will be synchronised instead of large amounts. This feature is not currently used by the Debian installer. So if you install to a system with multiple disks in a RAID-1 array (and probably RAID-5 and RAID-6) then every time there is a power failure the disks in the RAID will have to be completely read to ensure that they match. If the mdadm command that was used for the Debian installer had "-b internal" appended then the bitmap feature would be used and recovery from some failure conditions would be much faster. There does not seem to be any down-side to using this. I have not tested this with RAID-5 and RAID-6, but have tested the benefits of this option for RAID-1 and found it to be very useful. -- System Information: Debian Release: 4.0 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-5-686 Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) (ignored: LC_ALL set to C) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
