Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

[Helge Hafting]

"Chemolli Francesco (USI)" wrote:
> 
> > The argument that "if you use numbering based on where in the
> > SCSI chain
> > the disk is, disks don't pop in and out" is absolute crap.
> > It's not true
> > even for SCSI any more (there are devices that will aquire
> > their location
> > dynamically), and it has never been true anywhere else. Give it up.
> 
> We could do something like baptizing disks.. Fix some location
> (i.e. the absolutely last sector of the disk or the partition table or
> whatever) and store there some 32-bit ID
> (could be a random number, a progressive number, whatever).

Partition id's seems more interesting than disk id's - we normally
mount partitions not whole disks.  

RAID do this well - the raid autodetect partition stores an ID in the
last block,
the remaining N-1 blocks are available for a fs.

This could be extended to non-raid use - i.e. use the "raid autodetect"
partition type for non-raid as well.  The autodetect routine could
then create /dev/partitions/home, /dev/partitions/usr or
/dev/partitions/name_of_my_choice
for autodetect partitions not participating in a RAID.

This is better than volume labels, as it will work for all fs'es
(including those who don't support mount-by-ID) and also raw
partitions with no fs.

Helge Hafting