Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 16 Jun 1999 21:08:21 -0400 (EDT) | From | Bradley M Keryan <> | Subject | Re: Partition nightmare Was: Migrating to larger numbers |
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On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Riley Williams wrote:
> > Well, usually you mount all your harddisks on bootup, and I > > don't care if the system seeks a few partitions every five > > years. :-) > > Agreed, but the proposed change was to make ALL mounts be by volume > name, partition-name, or some indecipherable hex number stored in the > partition headers, and that idea is a non-starter as far as I'm > concerned.
Yikes, was someone proposing *that*? I agree that partitions should continue to be accessed through device files in /dev. UUIDs and labels shouldn't change that. They should just provide a way of identifying filesystems at fsck/mount time.
[snip] > > So why not read in that information once at bootup, act upon it > > and throw it away after some time or when a program tells us to? > > If it's only at boot time, then it's not a problem.
Umm, don't we already have a mechanism to throw the label/UUID data away after some time? Buffer cache. mount/fsck/whatever reads the file system superblock, and looks at the label/UUID/whatever. I guess the problem is when you do a number of consecutive fsck/mounts and the superblocks get flushed out by the amount of data that fsck reads.
And all "mount -L" does is basically
for partitions listed in /proc/partitions open the partition (/dev/whatever) lseek to superblock read superblock close strncmp to see if it's the right one if it is, mount it, else break
If you're using the Amiga RDB partition table, where there are partition names in the rigid disk block, fsck/mount could just look at the rigid disk block on its own to check partition labels. The kernel doesn't need to get involved.
The only problem with these schemes for normal use is that mounting a root filesystem is tricky. So initrd is necessary to use labels/UUIDs for everything.
Brad
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