RAID can make hald segfault

As mentioned in my last post I created three RAID arrays. Turns out that at least on Arch64 several arrays can cause hald (Hardware Abstraction Layer daemon) to crash, and thereby causing the new Xorg to not work since it relies on HAL to figure out the keyboard and the mouse (of course you can go back to the old way of configuring that especially on a server machine such as this, but hey, I really like things to work the way they are intended to!). However, I made the following changes to my setup compared to the previous post:

• removed raid1 and raid456 as well as dm-mod from the MODULES() line in /etc/rc.conf (post on lvm setup still to come but I got derailed by the hald issue)
• removed raid1 and raid456 as well as dm-mod from the MODULES() line in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
• changed the raid hook for the newer and apparently more capable mdadm hook in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf (not in the Arch wiki, but mentioned in a forum posting (more info). Seemed like a good idea although I haven't dug too deep.)
• commented out the two still unused arrays in /etc/mdadm.conf. I still would like to use them, but unless there's an update to hal I need to figure out some other use for those partitions, perhaps I'll just make logical volumes out of them without using RAID.
• rebuild the kernel/initrd (simplest thing is to run pacman -S kernel26, which will fix both the actual kernel image and the fallback image. Yeah I don't know the difference either...)

And now it works. I probably could have just commented out the two arrays in /etc/mdadm.conf, but I thought that it might be wise to prune the configurations in general. To be honest I have not understood how hooks and the different MODULES() lines interact so I usually probably add more stuff than needed, and I guess that might have a detrimental effect on functionality. I might also see if I can figure out wherein lies the fault, but there may be a fix in the works, see this bug report.