[PATCH] md: allow dirty raid[456] arrays to be started at boot
See patch to md.txt for more details
Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
diff --git a/Documentation/md.txt b/Documentation/md.txt
index 23e6cce..1dd0fb6 100644
--- a/Documentation/md.txt
+++ b/Documentation/md.txt
@@ -51,6 +51,30 @@
The kernel parameter "raid=partitionable" (or "raid=part") means
that all auto-detected arrays are assembled as partitionable.
+Boot time assembly of degraded/dirty arrays
+-------------------------------------------
+
+If a raid5 or raid6 array is both dirty and degraded, it could have
+undetectable data corruption. This is because the fact that it is
+'dirty' means that the parity cannot be trusted, and the fact that it
+is degraded means that some datablocks are missing and cannot reliably
+be reconstructed (due to no parity).
+
+For this reason, md will normally refuse to start such an array. This
+requires the sysadmin to take action to explicitly start the array
+desipite possible corruption. This is normally done with
+ mdadm --assemble --force ....
+
+This option is not really available if the array has the root
+filesystem on it. In order to support this booting from such an
+array, md supports a module parameter "start_dirty_degraded" which,
+when set to 1, bypassed the checks and will allows dirty degraded
+arrays to be started.
+
+So, to boot with a root filesystem of a dirty degraded raid[56], use
+
+ md-mod.start_dirty_degraded=1
+
Superblock formats
------------------