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It's a fun pasttime. I'm rewriting mdadm in rust: https://github.com/DavidVentura/mdadm-rs

Mostly, I am tired of tools requiring root access, or a block device, to function, even in read only mode.

If you have a file on disk (eg: a VM's disk) mdadm will refuse to show metadata, requiring root to do so.

> If you have a file on disk (eg: a VM's disk) mdadm will refuse to show metadata, requiring root to do so.

If that's an artificial limitation, surely it should be easy to fix?

Did the previous developers put it there for fun? Probably not.

The previous developers might have written it at the time when VM disk RAID images were not a consideration. (Apparently it was Linux 3.0, 2011.)

But even then, the device nodes should be protected by file ownership+permissions; why does the tool do its own check?

Chesterton’s fence. Ask the developer.