Re: Supporting human parsable journal_dev specifiers

Karel Zak
2014-07-15T11:52:32Z

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 10:28:24AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> I have a user request that mount be able to interpret the device
> specifier for the journal_dev mount option, so that instead of having
> to type something like
>
> mount -o journal_dev=0x0803 ....
>
> they could unstead use: "journal_dev=/dev/sda3" or even
> "journal_dev=LABEL=ext_journal". I assume the right way to do this is
> a mount helper? Or is this something that you would be willing to
> accept as a patch into util-linux?

I talked about it with Eric Sandeen year ago, and the decision was to
implement some generic FS independent solution based on variables in
mount options, something like

mount -o journal_dev=$(LABEL:<ext_journal_label>)

(or $LOGUUID for XFS log, etc).

It's not implemented yet, but I can try it if it's still necessary.

> If it is a mount helper, what's the best way to do things? Simply

Please, do not use mount helpers (/sbin/mount.<type>), it sucks in
many ways... it will be better to have a generic solution within
mount(8).

Karel

--
Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>