Accessing disks via their serial numbers.

[Pawel Jakub Dawidek]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 08:43:14AM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> 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.

That's right.

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

When last sector is already occupied.

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

The main one. One of the reasons I implemented glabel(8) native labeling
was a lack of something like this.
I hope you don't want to see UFS labels recognition removed, because
there is a different labeling mechanism?

> >[...], 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).

I hope we don't play "convince phk@" game here.
If it is not useful for you, doesn't mean it is useless in general.
Let's no forget about this.

And what are your arguments against such mechanism?

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheel.pl
pjd at FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!
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