Jesse Keating wrote:
On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 04:28 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:Do you really want your disk to be known as 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000 ?It's more correct than "/dev/sda" which can change based on the order of things plugged in, or the order of detection, and it's more unique than an arbitrary label.
I don't know what problems changing to /dev/sd? from /dev/hd? fixed, but it's surely introduced problems.
I used to be a sysprog on IBM mainframes (I remember OS/PCP) where one could not have two volumes with the same name mounted; if two were detected at IPL (boot) time, the operator had to choose one. Afer IPL an attempt to mount a duplicate was rejected.
One could make an exact copy of a disk as one does now using dd, but one could not mount both at the same time.
That scheme would solve the problem of having the wrong volume "/boot" mounted.
Again, I don't know what problem names such as 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000 are supposed to solve, but from the viewpoint if an "average" user they seem to me pretty well unusable.
A name souch as "/dev/sda" should not change during the life of a computer, some names (and I would include that in current kernels) should be reserved for interfaces on the mobo.
I think _I_ would fix names for on-board ATA, SATA, SCSI, then possible plugin ATA, SATA and SCSI cards (as determined by slots) and then firewire and USB could wander. Whether I'd stick with /dev/sda and sucn, or go for a slightly longer but predictable naming convention I'd want to consider at more length.
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