********************************************************************************
*                                                                              *
*   dmraid (Device-Mapper Software RAID support tool) 1.0.0-rc4  2004.09.07    *
*                                                                              *
*   (C)opyright 2004  Heinz Mauelshagen, Red Hat GmbH. All rights reserved.    *
*                                                                              *
********************************************************************************

Feature set:
------------
This software discovers, activates, deactivates and displays properties
of software RAID sets (eg, ATARAID) and contained DOS partitions.

dmraid uses libdevmapper and the device-mapper kernel runtime to create
devices with respective mappings for the ATARAID sets discovered.

The following ATARAID types are supported:

Highpoint HPT37X
Highpoint HPT45X
Intel Software RAID
Promise FastTrack
Silicon Image Medley

This ATARAID type is only basically supported in this version (I need
better metadata format specs; please help):
LSI Logic MegaRAID

Please provide insight to better support metadata formats.

Beside hints, enhancement proposals and patches, I want to know, if the mappings
the tool creates ("dmraid -tay") are correct for your ATARAID configuration.

Thanks for your support of dmraid.


License/Disclaimer:
-------------------
This software is released under the GPL/LGPL respectively.

See file headers, LICENSE, LICENSE_GPL and LICENSE_LGPL for details.

This is Alpha software and it can destroy your data!

So please take backups and start accessing your data in dmraid
activated ATARAID sets READ-ONLY first before you try to write it!


Minimum prerequisites to run this software:
-------------------------------------------

o a mainline Linux 2.6.[78] kernel patched with 2.6.[78]-udm1 from
  http://sources.redhat.com/dm/patches.html and device mapper enabled
  (including mirror!).
  This patch is mandatory to enable activation of RAID1(0) ATARAID sets!

o device mapper userpace installed (http://sources.redhat.com/dm/)

o the i386 rpm or source tarball for dmraid from
  http://people.redhat.com/~heinzm/sw/dmraid/


Build/Install:
--------------
To install the rpm

rpm -i [--nodeps] dmraid-1.0.0-rc4.i386.rpm

- or -

to build in an empty directory and install from source

tar jxvf dmraid-1.0.0-rc4.tar.bz2
./configure	# see ./configure --help for options
make
make install


In case you want to dietize dmraid, you need to build
devmapper with 'make CC="diet cc"' *and* install libdevmapper.a
as /lib/libdevmapper_dietc.a.
Run "./configure --enable-dietlibc" before make.


Howto start:
------------
See "dmraid -h" for the synopsis and "man dmraid" for more details
including some usage examples.

Your first command is probably "dmraid -s" :)

See TODO for known outstanding issues.

See doc/dmraid_design.txt for design notes.

See lib/format/template/ if you want to start your own metadata format
handler implementation :)


Contacts:
---------
The author can be reached at <Mauelshagen@RedHat.com>.

For discussions, questions, patches, enhancement requests etc.,
please subscribe and mail to <ataraid@redhat.com>.
