The mdadm utility for managing software RAID on Linux systems is out with a new release that adds new features while addressing some recent boot failure issues that were reported.

Driving the mdadm 4.6 release out the door was the desire to ship fixes for some recent boot failure reports. This includes Dracut iSCSI tests failing with mdadm 4.5 when tested on Debian. Another boot issue was the RAID array not assembling at boot with mdadm 4.5 during testing on Arch Linux. That RAID assembly issue hadn’t happened with mdadm 4.4 but only regressed in version 4.5.