[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>

1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/md.txt b/Documentation/md.txt
index 23e6cce40f9..1dd0fb6021c 100644
--- a/Documentation/md.txt
+++ b/Documentation/md.txt
@@ -51,6 +51,30 @@ superblock can be autodetected and run at boot time.
 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
 ------------------