What I'm Doing:

I would like to build a custom LFS system using only GNU utilities, an x86_64 linux kernel and perhaps a few other FOSS packages.

I have a via vt8237 fake bios RAID0 with two SATA disks. I would like to use dmraid to mount the drives from a livecd, and then develop the system.

Questions:
  1. What is a good 64-bit livecd that will have the build utilities necessary for this project, as well as dmraid? Or would you recommend using a disk-installed OS as the host?
  2. How can i have dmraid devices mapped before grub executes, so that i can put /dev/mapper/devicename in grub.conf ?
  3. How bad is the performance of dmraid devices? Do you have any benchmarks to share?
  4. Any other recommendations or advice you may have for this project.


Thank you!