Contributed by paul on 2008-07-18 from the department-of-redundancy-in-software dept.

Marco Peereboom (marco@) has just completed a major step in rewriting the metadata component of the software raid stack in OpenBSD ( softraid(4) ), and he needs your help to test it sufficiently so it will make the next release.

Update (Sat Jul 12 2008, 18:13:00 CEST): As pointed out by Lawrence Teo (thanks!) Marco has posted a new version of the diff here.

Marco explains the diff:

This is a full rewrite of the metadata code. This change does several things:



1. Eliminate bad checksums being caused by power failures or crashes

2. Unravel metadata code so that we can support multiple formats

3. Clean up name space

4. Merge thib's (thib@) pool diff



The missing portion right now is autoassemble. I'll work on that when this is in good enough shape to go in.



Even though I am not aware of any bugs at this point I suspect that something silly might have snuck in.



So please give it a twirl and let me know how it goes.



Please note: previous versions of metadata are not supported going forward; please back up your data before updating.

The Diff can be found at http://code.freedaemon.com/diffs/metadatarewrite.diff

Thanks to Marco for his continued contributions to OpenBSD. After you have completed the testing, feel free to show your appreciation by making a donation and asking your employers to help too