RAID

the_bro

The lesson states that:
1. RAID is a mature part of the kernel
2. the hardware implementation is much more efficient

In light of the fact that production systems nowadays most likely use NAS, could one perhaps argue that software RAID is an anachronism and should be removed from the kernel and made available as a package?

coop

why? People run Linux on ancient systems, you would be suprised. These kinds of things will persist for a very long time unless they get unmaintainted, get bitrot and are broken. One of Linux's strengths is that it can run on old hardware and there has to be an advantage to remove something We have thought of removing it from the class but that is a separate question.

the_bro

Fair question! I for one have few doubts as to the versatility and longevity of Linux; however, things are getting much more complex by the day (take the xfs and btrfs filesystems previously discussed, for example), and to keep things manageable, one could possibly argue (from a lay-man's perspective) that removing routines no longer generally used would be advantageous in terms of kernel size -- after all, you could always include it in your set-up by way of a package installation, if necessary.
With regards to removing it from the course, you'd lose my vote; I found the discussion quite useful from the perspective that since hardware will never be 100% reliable, these are key concepts any sys/NAS admin would need to embrace -- I'm sure there are other reasons...