> If I get a clear indication that this is the direction we want
> to go, then scsidev can be cleaned up and enhanced (making it volume
> label aware is one enhancement I wanted to add, especially now that
> ext2 supports volume labels). It also should be made filesystem aware
> too, I think so that it can recognize various types of filesystems
> (this is a prerequisite to being able to snarf the volume labels).
Main problem with this - What about IDE?
Those drives don't count? Any labeling scheme should be kernel based. I
would recommend handling the scsi naming versus the labeling issue
separately.
This is what I proposed in the debian-user list and was sent to linux-kernel
with it:
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I know this isn't a Debian question, but I have to start some place.
What list/NG would be *best* to submit a new idea for the kernel?
(actually maybe just lilo)
Problem: partition and drive shift
Solution: Name partitions like in the old Amiga days
How: Read the 'labels' of all partitions at start up and dynamiclly creates
entries in the /dev/ dir using that 'label' name with the correct
major/minor.
Example: If I have linux installed on Logical partition 7 and put that drive
on another system, sda7 magically becomes sdb7 and linux will not boot with
out reconfiguring. This sucks.
Example with fix: we mount /dev/linpar as root. We 'label' the linux
partiton linpar. The kernel starts up, and scans the labels of all the
partitions. It finds a type 83 with a label of linpar, and it creates a
/dev/linpar entry (or symlink) to the correct major and minor.
If anything moves, linpar will always be linpar, no matter if it's
physically sda1, sda5, hdb1, etc.
Taken even futher, the same works with type 06 (FAT) and 07 (HPFS) (maybe
others) partitions using the standard DOS label for the name of the
partitions. Similarly if you have a FAT partition you mount as /usr1 you
don't have to worry where it physically is, as long as it is named correctly.
I'll offer to help code this, it really looks quite easy to do.
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