Partitionable

Latest revision as of 10:53, 4 June 2006

md arrays can be partitioned just like other block devices (2.6)

This is useful for...

See the -a|--auto option in the mdadm man page for full details.

Simply create your array like this:

 mdadm --create /dev/media ... --auto p4

which tells mdadm to automatically create 4 partitions (it defaults to 5).

and mdadm will create:

 /dev/media
 /dev/media1
 /dev/media2
 /dev/media3
 /dev/media4

for you.

mdadm has a set of 'standard' formats which it uses to guide its behaviour when creating device files via the --auto option.

The standard names for non-partitioned arrays (the only sort of md array available in 2.4 and earlier) either of

 /dev/mdNN
 /dev/md/NN

where NN is a number. The standard names for partitionable arrays (as available from 2.6 onwards) is one of

 /dev/md/dNN
 /dev/md_dNN

Partition numbers should be indicated by added "pMM" to these, thus "/dev/md/d1p2".