Comment 80 for bug 120375

From my perspective, what needs to happen is that the issue of booting from a degraded root on kernel software raid needs a simple, easy to implement fix for those who run fixed configuration machines, I.E. servers and the like.

The provided patches seem to accomplish this goal with a boot parameter that an individual that administers/manages servers would be able to apply. Furthermore, it would be reasonable to me that the server distribution have that boot parameter set as a default to minimize the number of surprises.

Someone running a server system is unlikely to be using external storage that is not for backup of some sort or some type of more reliable hardware configuration (SAS, SCSI etc...) and can be considered on their own recognizance for doing weird things like making a raid stripe of firewire drives or something bizarre like that.

The issue of a desktop system booting with missing raid elements is another issue. The same workaround should be available for those who choose to run their root on software raid disks with the aforementioned caveats. It would of course be quite nice to have some sort of iterative y/n/r prompt sort of setup for filesystems listed in /etc/fstab so that a marginally technical user could interactively make a decision about continuing to bring the system up with degraded disks or a more technical user could set the kernel parameter, again at their own risk.

This discussion, while absolutely necessary, is somewhat political and outside the scope of this bug and belongs in another bug if for no other reason than to close the bug and stabilize the distro for those who are running business functions on it.

I am using Alexanders patch and will switch over to Dustin's as I have time. Thank you both for your contributions.