Chapter 12. 11h30 - dmraid - device-mapper RAID tool

dmraid - device-mapper RAID tool

Heinz Mauelshagen

This was another talk that I attended despite having almost no interest in the topic. I've never used raid and I don't forsee needing it anytime soon. Anyhow, it was interesting to attend this talk and to become more aware of all the things that Linux can do.

The RAID system is an interesting study: each manufacturer stores RAID data differently, stores different data, and stores it in different places. To make things easier the kernel only deals with one metadata format, tools translate between the different vendor formats and the kernel format. dmraid is the user-space tool which uses a user-space library. This data ends up going to device-mapper, which is the kernel-side implementation, and onwards to the driver.