Brown: A Nasty md/raid bug

Neil Brown has written a blog post about a nasty RAID bug in some versions of the Linux kernel. "The bug only fires when you shutdown/poweroff/reboot the machine. While the machine remains up the bug is completely inactive. So you will only notice the bug when you boot up again. The effect of the bug is to erase important information from the metadata that is stored on the disk drives. In particular the level, chunksize, number of devices, data_offset and role of each device in the array are erased ... and probably some other information too. This means that if you know those details you can recover your data, but if you don't, it will be harder. Hence the "mdadm -E" command suggested earlier."

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