We recently added
device-mapper and
dmraid to paldo testing.
Device-Mapper enables you to do a variety of things with block devices, read
here for further info. In combination with dmraid it is capable of granting access to many software RAID devices out there included on many mainboards.
paldo's initramfs included since linux-2.6.15 should detect such raid setups automatically. The disks are accessible through eather /dev/dm-n (for a integer n) or /dev/disks/by-name/<name of your raid setup>. Be advised: The original disks (sdX) are still available in /dev but any write operation on them will most certenly destroy your RAID setup.
Hint: Since initramfs includes all this tools, booting from such a RAID disk ist supported, however the GRUB setup is a little more complicated than usual because if you start GRUB out of your paldo it will not detect your raid. There are 2 possible ways to solve that:
1. You already have a GRUB in your master boot record: You can simply restart your computer and do the setup from the GRUB console at startup. (This works because the BIOS fakes the RAID devices).
2. You don't have any GRUB on your boot records: You have to tell grub which device it will find at starup. To do this you need to create a little file, called a
device-map. E.g.
hd0 /dev/dm-0
hd1 /dev/hda
Attention: Do not include your original member disk of the RAID system (/dev/sdX).
After doing that, fire GRUB with the --device-map=<your file> option and setup your MBR.
I have a perfectly working setup here with Intel Matrix Strorage RAID.