One method I've seen on another platform (Solaris/Veritas)
is as follows:
1) boot loader knows about a list of the various components
of the boot RAID device (accomplished via eeprom on SPARC)
and will attempt to boot from the first of these it can
talk to
2) first component is accessed in read-only mode (thus not
invalidating any RAID data) in order to load the kernel
far enough to go through the device detection/configuration
stages
3) after RAID devices have been detected and configured,
boot/root file systems can be re-mounted read/write
I'm not real familiar with the LILO or kernel-boot code
in Linux, so I don't know what kind of work it would be
to implement something like this, but I do know that this
process has worked extremely well for RAID1 root filesystems.
It wouldn't work very well for RAID0 or RAID5, I'm pretty
sure, but I've usually set up a relatively small RAID1
root filesystem and used RAID5, RAID1+0 (or 0+1) on other
larger file systems.
The only major problem I've gotten into with this is when
the root filesystem gets corrupted enough that the kernel
can't be found on the booted component, but hopefully that's
a **very** rare occurrence.
tw
--
+------------------------------+--------------------------+
| Tim Walberg | Phone: 847-782-2472 |
| TERAbridge Technologies Corp | FAX: 847-623-1717 |
| 1375 Tri-State Parkway | [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Gurnee, IL 60031 | 800-SKY-TEL2 PIN 9353299 |
+------------------------------+--------------------------+
PGP signature
