Though it is possible to create an array without using per-device superblocks (see below), each device in an MD array will normally have a super block written towards the end of the device. This superblock records information about the structure and state of the array so that the array can be reliably re-assembled after a shutdown.

The superblock is 4K long and is written into a 64K aligned block that starts at least 64K and less than 128K from the end of the device (i.e. to get the address of the superblock round the size of the device down to a multiple of 64K and then subtract 64K). The available size of each device is the amount of space before the super block, so between 64K and 128K is lost when a device in incorporated into an MD array.

The superblock contains, among other things:

LEVEL

The manner in which the devices are arranged into the array (linear, raid0, raid1, raid4, raid5, multipath).

UUID

a 128 bit Universally Unique Identifier that identifies the array that this device is part of.

It is possible for some md arrays to be created without a superblock. This allows the whole of each device to participate in the array, but requires some external mechanism to determine what devices should be arranged into which arrays.

FAULTY arrays are an obvious candidate for not having a superblock as there is nothing useful to go in the superblock. MUTIPATH arrays can also be usefully made without superblocks as there are likely to be other ways to detect that two paths connect to the same real devices.

Other array type can work without superblocks are RAID1, RAID0, and LINEAR. However these should only be made without a superblock if you are sure that you know what you are doing.

A linear array simply catenates the available space on each drive together to form one large virtual drive.

One advantage of this arrangement over the more common RAID0 arrangement is that the array may be reconfigured at a later time with an extra drive and so the array is made bigger without disturbing the data that is on the array. However this cannot yet be done on a live array.

A RAID0 array (which has zero redundancy) is also known as a striped array. A RAID0 array is configured at creation with a Chunk Size which must be a power of two, and at least 4 kibibytes.

The RAID0 driver assigns the first chunk of the array to the first device, the second chunk to the second device, and so on until all drives have been assigned one chunk. This collection of chunks forms a stripe. Further chunks are gathered into stripes in the same way which are assigned to the remaining space in the drives.

If devices in the array are not all the same size, then once the smallest device has been exhausted, the RAID0 driver starts collecting chunks into smaller stripes that only span the drives which still have remaining space.

A RAID1 array is also known as a mirrored set (though mirrors tend to provide reflected images, which RAID1 does not) or a plex.

Once initialised, each device in a RAID1 array contains exactly the same data. Changes are written to all devices in parallel. Data is read from any one device. The driver attempts to distribute read requests across all devices to maximise performance.

All devices in a RAID1 array should be the same size. If they are not, then only the amount of space available on the smallest device is used. Any extra space on other devices is wasted.

A RAID4 array is like a RAID0 array with an extra device for storing parity. This device is the last of the active devices in the array. Unlike RAID0, RAID4 also requires that all stripes span all drives, so extra space on devices that are larger than the smallest is wasted.

When any block in a RAID4 array is modified the parity block for that stripe (i.e. the block in the parity device at the same device offset as the stripe) is also modified so that the parity block always contains the "parity" for the whole stripe. i.e. its contents is equivalent to the result of performing an exclusive-or operation between all the data blocks in the stripe.

This allows the array to continue to function if one device fails. The data that was on that device can be calculated as needed from the parity block and the other data blocks.

RAID5 is very similar to RAID4. The difference is that the parity blocks for each stripe, instead of being on a single device, are distributed across all devices. This allows more parallelism when writing as two different block updates will quite possibly affect parity blocks on different devices so there is less contention.

This also allows more parallelism when reading as read requests are distributed over all the devices in the array instead of all but one.

RAID6 is similar to RAID5, but can handle the loss of any two devices without data loss. Accordingly, it requires N+2 drives to store N drives worth of data.

The performance for RAID6 is slightly lower but comparable to RAID5 in normal mode and single disk failure mode. It is very slow in dual disk failure mode, however.

MULTIPATH is not really a RAID at all as there is only one real device in a MULTIPATH md array. However there are multiple access points (paths) to this device, and one of these paths might fail, so there are some similarities.

A MULTIPATH array is composed of a number of logically different devices, often fibre channel interfaces, that all refer the the same real device. If one of these interfaces fails (e.g. due to cable problems), the multipath driver will attempt to redirect requests to another interface.

The FAULTY md module is provided for testing purposes. A faulty array has exactly one component device and is normally assembled without a superblock, so the md array created provides direct access to all of the data in the component device.

The FAULTY module may be requested to simulate faults to allow testing of other md levels or of filesystems. Faults can be chosen to trigger on read requests or write requests, and can be transient (a subsequent read/write at the address will probably succeed) or persistant (subsequent read/write of the same address will fail). Further, read faults can be "fixable" meaning that they persist until a write request at the same address.

Fault types can be requested with a period. In this case the fault will recur repeatedly after the given number of requests of the relevant type. For example if persistent read faults have a period of 100, then every 100th read request would generate a fault, and the faulty sector would be recorded so that subsequent reads on that sector would also fail.

There is a limit to the number of faulty sectors that are remembered. Faults generated after this limit is exhausted are treated as transient.

The list of faulty sectors can be flushed, and the active list of failure modes can be cleared.

When changes are made to a RAID1, RAID4, RAID5 or RAID6 array there is a possibility of inconsistency for short periods of time as each update requires are least two block to be written to different devices, and these writes probably won't happen at exactly the same time. Thus if a system with one of these arrays is shutdown in the middle of a write operation (e.g. due to power failure), the array may not be consistent.

To handle this situation, the md driver marks an array as "dirty" before writing any data to it, and marks it as "clean" when the array is being disabled, e.g. at shutdown. If the md driver finds an array to be dirty at startup, it proceeds to correct any possibly inconsistency. For RAID1, this involves copying the contents of the first drive onto all other drives. For RAID4, RAID5 and RAID6 this involves recalculating the parity for each stripe and making sure that the parity block has the correct data. This process, known as "resynchronising" or "resync" is performed in the background. The array can still be used, though possibly with reduced performance.

In 2.6 Linux kernels, an md array is marked clean after a short period (around 20 milliseconds) of no write activity, and then marked dirty before any subsequent write is attempted. This means that unclean shutdowns are much less likely with a 2.6 kernel.

If a RAID4, RAID5 or RAID6 array is degraded (missing at least one drive) when it is restarted after an unclean shutdown, it cannot recalculate parity, and so it is possible that data might be undetectably corrupted. The 2.4 md driver does not alert the operator to this condition. The 2.5 md driver will fail to start an array in this condition without manual intervention.

If the md driver detects any error on a device in a RAID1, RAID4, RAID5 or RAID6 array, it immediately disables that device (marking it as faulty) and continues operation on the remaining devices. If there is a spare drive, the driver will start recreating on one of the spare drives the data what was on that failed drive, either by copying a working drive in a RAID1 configuration, or by doing calculations with the parity block on RAID4, RAID5 or RAID6.

While this recovery process is happening, the md driver will monitor accesses to the array and will slow down the rate of recovery if other activity is happening, so that normal access to the array will not be unduly affected. When no other activity is happening, the recovery process proceeds at full speed. The actual speed targets for the two different situations can be controlled by the speed_limit_min and speed_limit_max control files mentioned below.

The md driver recognised three different kernel parameters.

raid=noautodetect

This will disable the normal detection of md arrays that happens at boot time. If a drive is partitioned with MS-DOS style partitions, then if any of the 4 main partitions has a partition type of 0xFD, then that partition will normally be inspected to see if it is part of an MD array, and if any full arrays are found, they are started. This kernel paramenter disables this behaviour.

raid=partitionable

raid=part

These are available in 2.6 and later kernels only. They indicate that autodetected MD arrays should be created as partitionable arrays, with a different major device number to the original non-partitionable md arrays. The device number is listed as mdp in /proc/devices.

md=n,dev,dev,...

md=dn,dev,dev,...

This tells the md driver to assemble /dev/md n from the listed devices. It is only necessary to start the device holding the root filesystem this way. Other arrays are best started once the system is booted.

In 2.6 kernels, the d immediately after the = indicates that a partitionable device (e.g. /dev/md/d0) should be created rather than the original non-partitionable device.

md=n,l,c,i,dev...

This tells the md driver to assemble a legacy RAID0 or LINEAR array without a superblock. n gives the md device number, l gives the level, 0 for RAID0 or -1 for LINEAR, c gives the chunk size as a base-2 logarithm offset by twelve, so 0 means 4K, 1 means 8K. i is ignored (legacy support).