Integrate standard MD RAID libs to support RAID 5/6


BVD

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As far as I'm aware, unraid is still using modified versions of the md and associated r5/r6 libraries/drivers (while still called raid5/raid6, we call the patched r5/r6 files instead of the originals). My request here is that we instead create a 'new' function/driver (same functionality as now, but called separately from raid 5/6 source), so we can use the standard md commands to create md RAID storage (allowing for us to use standard LVM as well, which is the real benefit here).

 

My own personal reason for this - I need to create numerous backup appliance VMs for work in order to go through a bunch of testing whose workload is such that XFS is the best option for me, but currently I can only use a single drive for this (unless I got really hacky and did it on top of ZFS... but that's just a crazy amount of hardware and complexity to throw this). As they're backup appliances, their minimum (supported at least) storage capacity and IO needs are such that a single disk won't suffice.

 

Other more broadly appealing reasons to do this:

  • It'd enable solving numerous other feature requests (such as vfs shadow copies and the like)
  • Higher performance pool available without the inherent resource overhead of zfs, or the latency hit of btrfs
  • Lays the groundwork to support other kernel storage tools via plugins (e.g. anything that requires LVM that someone wants can be easily created/used)
  • Upvote 1
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