The mdadm utility for managing software RAID on Linux systems is out with a new release that adds new features while addressing some recent boot failure issues that were reported.

Driving the mdadm 4.6 release out the door was the desire to ship fixes for some recent boot failure reports. This includes [1]Dracut iSCSI tests failing with mdadm 4.5 when tested on Debian. Another boot issue was [2]the RAID array not assembling at boot with mdadm 4.5 during testing on Arch Linux. That RAID assembly issue hadn't happened with mdadm 4.4 but only regressed in version 4.5.

The mdadm 4.5 release also adds support for a new lockless bitmap feature, a new "PROBING ddf_extended" option in the mdadm.conf user configuration file, and the --detail usage option is now documented in the README.

The mdadm 4.6 release also has fixes for an endianness issue, dealing with hot-unplugged devices in the Intel platform, optimizing DDF header search using mmap for better performance, build fixes when using the GCC 16 compiler, and other fixes.

Downloads and more details on the mdadm 4.6 release at [3]git.kernel.org .



[1] https://github.com/md-raid-utilities/mdadm/issues/238

[2] https://github.com/md-raid-utilities/mdadm/issues/246

[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/mdadm/mdadm.git/commit/?h=main&id=8b414a0d4753693d67b9a5822994e5f0c91b0b0a