Re: Linux not adhering to BIOS Drive boot order?

[David Balazic <david.balazic@uni-mb.si>]

Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolinux.com> wrote :

> David Woodhouse writes:
> > There are patches available for the 2.2 kernel which provide the facility 
> > to mount by UUID or volume label. It seems that nobody is actively 
> > maintaining those at the moment. If you want to update those to the current 
> > 2.2 and 2.4 kernels, well volunteered. 
>                    
> I'm quite interested in this patch, and have taken a good look at it.
> Some changes are in order (IMHO) to make it more usable. It should take
> parameters that are the same as in /etc/fstab (i.e. LABEL= and UUID=
> instead of L: and UUID:).

A trivial change...

> In the end I re-wrote most of the patch, so
> that we resolve ROOT_DEV before calling mount_root(), just to be a bit
> more consistent. I will release a new patch for 2.2.18 and 2.4.0 after
> David Balazic has a look at it.

Cool, send it to me !

> I know a bit about LILO, so I should be able to get the "root=LABEL=" to
> work there as well.   

There were no problems with the original patch with LILO.
You just must use append="root=xxxxx" instead of simply
root=xxx , because LILO tries to be "smart" .... at least the
version I used then did.

> I also need to do some work like this in e2fsprogs, so it may make sense
> to create a little library that can be updated to handle other kinds of
> filesystem/partition LABELs and UUIDs as the need arises. They were
> talking about putting a LABEL/UUID into reiserfs recently. This saves
> us from having to fix ext2-specific in dozens of utilities (e.g. LILO,
> mount, fsck, dump, etc). 
>        
> One reason why this may NOT ever make it into the kernel is that I know
> "kernel poking at devices" is really frowned upon.

This an ugly hack , if you ask me. The identificators ( be it labels ,
UUIDs
or whatever ) should be outside the partitions. Otherwise cases with
swap partitions , <any FS that doesn't support labels/UUIDs> unformatted
partitions etc. can not be handled.

-- 
David Balazic
--------------
"Be excellent to each other." - Bill & Ted
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