MegaIDE and DMRaid
I've ranted before about the difficulties of getting a 2.6 kernel to work with a Silicon Image ATA Controller , Afterall it seemed that it was just a case of bad habits
The problems I was running into was that I could partition a disk, say /dev/hdd1 make a filesystem on it but not mount it, or when I got so lucky to mount it and write on it, at the next reboot the data wasn't there anymore.
I repeatedly spent a couple of minutes looking after a replacement for the MegaIDE that existed in 2.4 for a 2.6 kernel, never found one.
Now it seems that support has been there al the time and that dmraid seemed to be my friend all along,
As soon as you realise that you know you have to stop using /dev/hdwhatever and use /dev/mapper/$devicename , and that seems to work like a charm :)
root@cnode1 ~# dmraid -s *** Active Set name : lsi_cdhajaiciia size : 78165359 stride : 128 type : stripe status : ok subsets: 0 devs : 1 spares : 0 *** Active Set name : lsi_cdhajaiciib size : 78165359 stride : 128 type : stripe status : ok subsets: 0 devs : 1 spares : 0 *** Active Set name : lsi_cdhajaiciic size : 78165359 stride : 128 type : stripe status : ok subsets: 0 devs : 1 spares : 0 *** Active Set name : lsi_cdhajaiciid size : 78165359 stride : 128 type : stripe status : ok subsets: 0 devs : 1 spares : 0
I only needed access to 4 separate disks, but off course the moment you really want to put these disk in raid you'll have to get this into your initrd.