From: NeilBrown If we - shut down a clean array, - restart with one (or more) drive(s) missing - make some changes - pause, so that they array gets marked 'clean', the event count on the superblock of included drives will be the same as that of the removed drives. So adding the removed drive back in will cause it to be included with no resync. To avoid this, we only update the eventcount backwards when the array is not degraded. In this case there can (should) be no non-connected drives that we can get confused with, and this is the particular case where updating-backwards is valuable. Signed-off-by: Neil Brown Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- drivers/md/md.c | 13 +++++++++++++ 1 files changed, 13 insertions(+) diff -puN drivers/md/md.c~md-avoid-backward-event-updates-in-md-superblock-when-degraded drivers/md/md.c --- a/drivers/md/md.c~md-avoid-backward-event-updates-in-md-superblock-when-degraded +++ a/drivers/md/md.c @@ -1597,6 +1597,19 @@ void md_update_sb(mddev_t * mddev) repeat: spin_lock_irq(&mddev->write_lock); + + if (mddev->degraded && mddev->sb_dirty == 3) + /* If the array is degraded, then skipping spares is both + * dangerous and fairly pointless. + * Dangerous because a device that was removed from the array + * might have a event_count that still looks up-to-date, + * so it can be re-added without a resync. + * Pointless because if there are any spares to skip, + * then a recovery will happen and soon that array won't + * be degraded any more and the spare can go back to sleep then. + */ + mddev->sb_dirty = 1; + sync_req = mddev->in_sync; mddev->utime = get_seconds(); if (mddev->sb_dirty == 3) _