Fedora Installer Looks To Change Its BIOS/Fake RAID Handling

Red Hat engineers are working on changing their BIOS RAID "fake RAID" support within the Fedora installer for the F38 cycle.

Currently the Fedora installer by way of the Blivet storage library makes use of DMRAID for supporting BIOS RAID arrays, but the plan by Red Hat is to replace it with MDADM.

Due to DMRAID no longer being actively maintained, they want to switch it to MDADM and as it would then mean one less dependency in the installer (MDADM is already pulled in for software RAID support) and being able to drop the DMRAID systemd activation service.

On the downside, MDADM doesn't support all BIOS RAID types prior to the RAID Disk Data Format standardization. Red Hat engineers don't know though how many people (if any) are still relying on old BIOS RAID arrays not supported by MDADM and still moving to new Fedora installations, so any contingency planning or alternatives have yet to be devised. They certainly though are interested in hearing from any Fedora Linux users still relying on old BIOS RAID arrays.

See this post from the Fedora development mailing list on the BIOS RAID installer changes being discussed.