Accessing disks via their serial numbers.

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <20060626080038.GA12511 at garage.freebsd.pl>, Pawel Jakub Dawidek writ
es:

There is a not at all subtle difference between names which relate
to the contents of the disk (as for g_label) or names which relate
to a specific physical position (as for ATA_STATIC_ID) and what you
propose where the name binds to a specific drive mechanism.

The former two allows you to do offline copy/recovery and replacement
of a disk drive, the latter does not.

>Glabel(8) currently supports labeling any GEOM provider, but it steals
>the last sector, which is not always acceptable.

When is it not acceptable ?

And is this the only reason why you think we need serial numbers for
names ?

>[...], but we need to have a general
>mechanism inside the kernel for getting such informations.

This is a very broad statement, and I don't agree (yet).

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.