Fedora 41 How do I create a linear software RAID since kernel support was dropped

I want to create a linear software RAID in Fedora 41. However kernel support for linear was discontinued. Is there a new way to create a linear software RAID? Or should I just create an LVM? What’s the proper thing to do now?

I am not familiar with is term. Which RAID level is it?

Linear. The drives are concatenated into giant drive.

So RAID 0?

I’ve only seen it called linear, but I’m also learning about it myself so I don’t know if they are the same or not.

I think you’re on the right track with lvm. Another tool is btrfs which can pool your drives and provide a filesystem so you only need one tool instead of two.

Same as JBOD (Just Big Old Disk)… where RAID 0 is striped across the disks with no error correction, JBOD/Linear is basically 1 disk concatenated to the other, no striping.

I used this on F40 during install, but didn’t try it F41 or hear about software RAID being dropped:

sudo mdadm --create '/dev/md/raid0' --name='RAID' --level='0' --raid-devices='2' '/dev/nvme0n1' '/dev/sda' --verbose

One major concern with RAID 0, or linear as termed here, is adding points of failure.

Whether it uses 2 devices or 200 devices, each physical device is a single point of failure that can wipe out the entire file system. No redundancy and no protection from a single failure.

The only protection with a RAID 0 array is to have a robust and frequent backup procedure that is diligently followed.

Software raid has not been dropped, as can be seen by the fact that mdadm is still very much present in the installation. I think there would be a significant uproar should it be dropped completely. Software raid is used throughout most of the linux distros and not just in fedora.

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