From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Christoph Hellwig Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 16:59:32 +0000 Subject: Re: [Linux-ia64] GUID filesystem+device identification ? Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 06:50:44PM +0200, Martin Wilck wrote: > > Hi all, > > Has anybody yet thought about the possibility to use > a mechanism like devfs for identifying devices and file systems > by their GUID? This would be a major improvement over Linux's current > approach of identifying devices, particularly disk drives. > > In principle, it would be possible to change controllers and > disks arbitrarily and still maintain a valid file system in which > all devices and sub-file systems would be identified by ther GUIDs > (think of the device in fstab specified by GUID instead of /dev/sda3 > or whatever). I think support for GUID=foo in /etc/fstab for mount would be pretty easy. Having it in ther kernel would be nicer and shouldn't be that difficult, on the other hand it'll need a consensus on wether the kernel should look at every partition on startup - IIRC some people where opposed to such soloutions in the past. Christoph -- Of course it doesn't work. We've performed a software upgrade.