[Beowulf] Beowulf Storage Node

[Matt Lawrence]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Per Jessen wrote:

> Matt Lawrence wrote:
>> Sure it is.  The only issue you may run into is that the partition
>> containing /boot can't be on software RAID, grub & lilo don't know how
>> to deal with RAID partitions.
>
> That's not correct - lilo has no such problems.

I've never seen anything about how to make lilo work with RAID 5 or RAID 
6, and I wouldn't try it with RAID 0.  It works almost always with RAID 1 
because the partition looks like an ordinary partition and filesystem.  I 
expect it would fail badly if there was a read error that RAID would have 
recovered from.

It may be a bit pedantic, but at boot time, having two copies of a 
partition to boot off of is very similar, but not exactly like having RAID 
1.  Once the kernel and initrd have been loaded, the options increase 
dramatically.  There are certainly some really annoying limitations to the 
PC BIOS and I'm very glad that new generations of firmware are being 
developed that will get past the current restrictions.

-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts.
It's what I can remember in time to use.