Comment 74 for bug 136252

Surbhi,

Sorry to be so long in reviewing this. Some questions about the proposed SRU diff:

  * While rebuilding the mapfile (mdadm -Ir), if appropriate name is not found
    in /dev/md, look for a name in mdadm.conf or the metadata.

There's no bug number for this change. What issue is this fixing? This also doesn't appear to be in mdadm 3.1.4 - is the issue fixed differently in later releases?

  * Allow an empty name rather than "unknown" for an array

What issue is this fixing (no bug number)? Is there any chance of regression from this change?

  * Identify md0 correctly - fixed typo (LP: #532960)

The SRU diff is 900 lines long... can you be more specific about which line is the typo fix for this bug? :)

  * Resolve issues like mdadm -Ss; mdadm: unable to open /dev/md/r1: "No such
    file or directory"
  * Report the correct superblock version.
  * Correct the logic for partitions in md devices. Use /sys/dev links to map
    major/minor to devnum in sysfs
  * Changed the open_mddev_devnum() to create_mddev_devnum() - as its really
    creating something in /dev. Also renamed for porting few changes from
    mdadm-3.4.1 to mdadm-2.6.7.x
  * If two devices are added via -I, mdadm can get badly confused. Fixed this.

Again, not clear which changes map to which changelog entries, making it very difficult to review this. Maybe a bzr branch with individual commits would make this easier to understand?

  * For autoassembly to work properly the initramfs should set the hostname.
    Copy the hostname binary and /etc/hostname in the initramfs so as to set
    the hostname at boot time. (LP: #136252)

It's surprising that initramfs-tools' init calls hostname, but doesn't take any steps to make it available in the initramfs. But I think this is still the right place to do the copy since only when mdadm is used do we need it in the initramfs.

  * At installation time hostname will not be set before the array is
    created. Thus the uuid written on the root array created at Ubuntu
    installation time will never correspond to that of the hostname. Due to
    this auto assembly will never work. Add support to use the machine name
    when the hostname is unspecified example at installation time.
    (LP: #136252) (LP: #532960) (LP: #330399)

None of the referenced bugs appear to discuss this happening at installation time. Can you explain why this would happen at install time? Isn't setting the host name one of the first things done in the installer? If that's not being done correctly, is there a bug to track fixing this issue in the installer, too? (Of course, we still need mdadm to cope with any systems that were already installed this way.)

  * Fix the error " /dev/MKDEV not found"

From what I see, this isn't an error, just a warning. I don't think this is appropriate to include in an SRU.