Fistful of Linux Updates

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:59:59 -800

So I've been working on an open-source driver for Adaptec HostRAID drivers since
last December. Currently, there's a binary "a320raid" driver that you can get
from Adaptec, but as Greg K-H continually points out, binary drivers are a pain.
So much of a pain, in fact, that IBM _and_ Adaptec are supporting my efforts.
The solution comes in the form of dmraid(8), a configuration program for the
device-mapper module in the kernel. dmraid knows how to read various vendors'
fakeraid metadata formats; for now, I'm adding support for the old Adaptec
HostRAID format (not DDF, though that will come later). I'm also looking into
any necessary grub modifications, and getting these changes into distros. It
turns out that Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.04 will support dmraid right out of
the box. Hopefully I can get patches into at least one of them in time. :)