[klibc] [patch] skip existing md devices

[Aaron Griffin]

On 5/10/06, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> Aaron Griffin wrote:
> > The following patch will ignore already configured md devices in
> > kinit.  The rationale is that, if an md device already exists, it was
> > previously assembled by some other tool (e.g. mdadm) and should remain
> > there.  Currently, kinit removes it and attempts to recreate it, which
> > can cause all sorts of issues, especially in the situation that, the
> > md device is further encrypted and/or is an lvm volume.
>
> I'm not sure if the existence of a device node in /dev should be sufficient to suppress
> operation on that md device.  It would probably be better off querying the md device for
> its state (via the GET_ARRAY_INFO) ioctl and skip it if it is running (or even just
> assembled?)

My 2 cents is that that may make sense in normal userspace, but in
early-userspace it's pretty clear - if it exists it was explicitly
created and assembled, unless of course someone oddly did a 'mknod' or
some such nonsense.

Still, you might be right.  It may be more proper to use some ioctls.