Re: Linux not adhering to BIOS Drive boot order?

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolinux.com>]

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:).  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.

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

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.

Cheers, Andreas
-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert
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