NetBSD GSoC 2026: N-way RAID 1 and RAID Scrubbing Land in RAIDframe
NetBSD GSoC 2026 Improving RAIDframe
As part of Google Summer of Code 2026, Emmanuel Nyarko extended NetBSD's RAIDframe with two major features: N-way RAID 1, which allows mirroring across more than two disks for added redundancy, and RAID scrubbing, which checks disk sectors for read failures. The project also updates layout, sector mapping, DAG execution, and reconstruction to support the new RAID level 'N'. Testing on various configurations is underway, with future plans to validate other RAID levels and potentially merge N-way RAID 1 as the default RAID 1 implementation.
For example, in a five way RAID1 setup, it will involve one primary and 4 parity/secondary disks.
- throw0101d
Reading raid(4) [1] it looks like RAID-6 is not supported: I would think with drives sizes being what they are in recent years (decades?), protection from a double-fault during a re-stripe would be important. Or is RAIDframe mostly supposed to be used for 'smaller situations' (like a boot drive)?
[1] https://man.netbsd.org/raid.4
I first ran across the "RAID-5 is dead" 'meme' almost twenty years ago, with concerns that when drives reached >2TB you get higher chances of failed rebuilds due to BER / UER rates:
* https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-20...
See also 2013 follow-up:
- nazgulsenpai
I say this everytime I see a NetBSD post but they still have tier 2 ports for
Dreamcast, Sony NET WORK STATION, Zaurus, Sharp x68000, among many many others that I'm less familiar with.
It's why it doesn't really bother me when, say, the Linux kernel drops hardware support for older architectures.
Much respect to the NetBSD and port maintainers.