Red Hat engineers are working on changing the Fedora installer’s BIOS RAID support in the Fedora 38 cycle.

Currently the Fedora installer uses DMRAID to support BIOS RAID arrays, and since DMRAID is no longer actively maintained, Red Hat’s plan is to replace it with MDADM. Using mdadm to support software RAID means fewer dependencies for the installer and fewer services (dmraid-activation.service) to run during startup.

But here’s a potential problem: MDADM doesn’t support all BIOS RAID types, it only supports the common RAID Disk Data Format Standard (DDF) and Intel Matrix Storage Technology (IMSM), so switching to MDADM removes the standardization of DDF that existed before Some old formats are supported. But it’s unknown how many users are still relying on legacy BIOS RAID arrays that are not supported by MDADM and need to migrate to the new Fedora 38 release.

Red Hat engineer Vojtech Trefny raised a discussion on the Fedora development mailing list, asking those using BIOS RAID to check whether they are using MDADM or DMRAID and give him feedback.

You can find out by checking the filesystem type on the underlying disk, eg “lsblk -f”. The types supported by MDADM are “ddf_raid_member” and “isw_raid_member”, and the types supported by DMRAID are “adaptec_raid_member”, “jmicron_raid_member”, “lsi_mega_raid_member”, “nvidia_raid_member” and so on.