Some articles about GRUB and md-based RAID1 (mirroring) seem to imply that GRUB can read files (including the kernel and the initrd file) from /boot on the filesystem on a mirrored partition.
Since GRUB hasn't loaded the kernel file yet, GRUB can't be using the kernel and its md driver, and therefore can't be reading the partition _as_a_RAID_ _volume_ (/dev/mdX), right? So is GRUB just reading the partition directly to get to the file system? Specifically, is GRUB taking advantage of the fact that the RAID metadata is written at the end of a partition that is a component of a RAID volume (and that a file system doesn't care if the block device it's in actually contains more blocks than the filesystem knows about)? If so, how reliable is that? Should one put /boot on a plain, non-RAID partition on one disk and somehow (manually or automatically) maintain a backup /boot partition on the second disk, or is it fine to put /boot on a mirrored partition (so maintaining redundancy is automatic) and let GRUB read the partition directly? Thanks, Daniel -- (Plain text sometimes corrupted to HTML "courtesy" of Microsoft Exchange.) [F]
