Package: util-linux Severity: wishlist Please add support for detecting RAID array membership and skip attempting to read partition tables of disks that are members of an array. Or, if already doing so for linux software RAID, please add support for fakeraid.
As you can read in the discussion that took place under bug #778712, a few days ago I was attempting to write a GPT partition table to a fakeraid RAID0 array that I had just setup using my motherboard firmware (not knowing at the time that linux software RAID is better supported and recommended unless dual booting with Windows). This turned into a confusing mess leaving me thinking that parted might have a grave bug. Actually it was just a combination of: 1) parted not understanding RAID array membership, resulting in confusing info being output. 2) fdisk also not understanding RAID array membership, resulting in confusing info and an error being ouput. 3) fdisk (understandably) not flushing the disk caches of the member disks after writing a partition table to the array, thus leading me to think that doing 'parted -l' afterwards was modifying the disk, breaking things, when in fact all it was doing was flushing the caches, allowing the true state of things to be revealed in the next use of 'fdisk -l'. 4) My having no clue that any caches were involved in any of this. 5) The (default) stripe size used for the array being 16KiB, small enough for the GPT table to be split across the two disks, resulting in it appearing corrupt when the tools viewed an array member as a standalone disk. If fdisk flushed every disk cache when performing 'fdisk -l', like parted does, then I never would have attributed a problem directly to parted, however I am not advocating such a change, since if only fdisk and parted understood array membership, then no confusion would have resulted whatsoever. Please add such support. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
