Re: e2label suggestions

["Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com>]

Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 02:48:50PM -0700, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
>  
>
> > e2label takes as parms:
> >
> > e2label <device name> <mount point>
> >    
>
> Actually, it's label name, not "mount point".  Some
> people/distributions will use a label name of "/" for the root
> filesystem, but that is purely a convention.
>
>  
>
> > What's useless about this is the association of device name and file 
> > system label which is completely broken on SATA systems which do dynamic
> > assignment.  e2label was a great idea, but did not go far enough to 
> > abstract. 
> >    
>
> It's not an association of device name and file system label.  It is
> an assignment of a filesystme label to a *filesystem*.  The label is
> actually stored in the ext3's superblock.
>
>  
>
> > The Initial mount sequence using:
> >
> > root=LABEL=/
> >
> > should be modified to ignore the device assignment and dunamically scan 
> > the drives for the root drive for initial bootup and DETECT
> > the device assignment rather then reverting to fixed device 
> > assignments.  As implemented it's pretty useless and is simply an aliasing
> > mechanism rather than solving the problem of the system being truly 
> > dynamic. 
> >    
>
> You can do this, and on some distributions it does work that way; the
> initial root device is actually an initrd, and the initrd will search
> the drivers looking for the root drive.  The blkid library, or the
> blkid program, can be used provide that functionality (indeed the
> mount program, when passed the argument "LABEL=/" can be compiled to
> use the blkid library to do this searching).
>
> So it does (or at least can) work this way already, but it's all
> userspace stuff which is currently distro-specific.  Which brings up
> the question why you posted this on LKML....
>
> 						- Ted
>  
Ted,

Thanks for clarifying. It does NOT work this way today, and the 
detection of and translation of
LABEL=/ is passed in the kernel, so its a kernel issue. e2label also 
originated here, and yes I know about where
its stored. I will modify the kernels we use to translate this into a 
dynamic device handle. What
the rest of the world does is its problem. I was making a suggestion. 
See subject = "suggestions".

Thanks for responding. This has been helpful.

Jeff

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