The idea behind a RAID class is to provide a uniform interface to all
RAID subsystems (both hardware and software) in the kernel.
To do that, I've made this class a transport class that's entirely
subsystem independent (although the matching routines have to match per
subsystem, as you'll see looking at the code). I put it in the scsi
subdirectory purely because I needed somewhere to play with it, but it's
not a scsi specific module.
I used a fusion raid card as the test bed for this; with that kind of
card, this is the type of class output you get:
jejb@titanic> ls -l /sys/class/raid_devices/20\:0\:0\:0/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 16 17:21 component-0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:80/0000:80:04.0/host20/target20:1:0/20:1:0:0/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 16 17:21 component-1 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:80/0000:80:04.0/host20/target20:1:1/20:1:1:0/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 16 17:21 device -> ../../../devices/pci0000:80/0000:80:04.0/host20/target20:0:0/20:0:0:0/
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 16384 Aug 16 17:21 level
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 16384 Aug 16 17:21 resync
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 16384 Aug 16 17:21 state
So it's really simple: for a SCSI device representing a hardware raid,
it shows the raid level, the array state, the resync % complete (if the
state is resyncing) and the underlying components of the RAID (these are
exposed in fusion on the virtual channel 1).
As you can see, this type of information can be exported by almost
anything, including software raid.
The more difficult trick, of course, is going to be getting it to
perform configuration type actions with writable attributes.
Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>
James Bottomley