[dm-devel] Differentiating between dm devices
Hannes Reinecke
hare at suse.de
Thu Mar 24 07:23:45 UTC 2011
On 03/23/2011 06:30 PM, Phillip Susi wrote:
> There are different classes of dm devices that different utilities may
> or may not care about. Some are intended to represent whole disks (
> dmraid ) that can be partitioned. Some ARE partitions and should
> contain filesystems. Still others are used only internally by the tools
> ( -real, -cow for lvm, and raid10 subvolumes for dmraid ). I can not
> find any good way to differentiate between these types.
>
And indeed you are right, there is none.
> One way of fixing this is to add a new attribute to the device where the
> tools creating them can specify a hint about what they are and how they
> should be used. Another way is to embed that information in the UUID.
> For instance, logical volumes have UUIDs that start with "LVM-" and
> dmraid disks start with "DMRAID-". Perhaps dmraid partitions could have
> their uuids changed to "DMRAIDP-" and internal devices changed to
> "DMRAIDI-" and "LVMI-" for dmraid and lvm respectively.
>
That is the approach I've been following for SUSE.
The UUID is assumed to be of this syntax:
<type>-<identifier>
where <type> is defined by the program creating the mapping.
EG 'mpath' for multipath, 'partX' (where 'X' is the partition
number) for kpartx etc.
Not that these prefixes are registered in any way; would be nice
to have them registered / documented somewhere.
Cool would be to have them build into the module :-)
Cheers,
Hannes
--
Dr. Hannes Reinecke zSeries & Storage
hare at suse.de +49 911 74053 688
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg
GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
More information about the dm-devel
mailing list