Switch from legacy ata(4) to CAM-based ATA

Doug Barton dougb at FreeBSD.org
Thu Apr 21 00:23:59 UTC 2011


On 04/20/2011 16:01, Warren Block wrote:

> Not sure I understand the question. I have a little article called
> FreeBSD Labeled Filesystems:
> http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/labels.html

That's a good article, but it highlights what seem to be some 
deficiencies in the various implementations. For the most part they seem 
ufs-centric, although glabel shows some promise for supporting ext2fs 
and msdosfs (both of which are workhorse file systems for me). In your 
article you point out another thing that seems sub-optimal to me, 
different locations for different types of things which are all referred 
to as labels.

My primary concern however is, quite frankly, that it isn't being done 
the way linux does it, on 2 fronts. First, I like the fact that on linux 
the labels are created with uuidgen at install time, and all the 
configuration is transparent to the user. Here is a good article that 
gives an overview: http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/146951, although 
searching for "linux uuid disk label" yielded a lot of good results. 
(Testing with our uuidgen(1) I noticed that we would probably need to do 
some work to support more methods to make it a little less predictable, 
but that shouldn't be difficult).

The other concern I have is that having installed linux (ubuntu 
specifically) it's already created labels for things. If I run glabel is 
it potentially going to overwrite them? Why can't 'glabel list' (or some 
other tool) "see" those labels? And if this kind of label already 
exists, why can't we just use it?

Finally, is glabel (which seems to be the only option for multi-fs 
labeling) be used safely for at least msdosfs and ext2fs? And if glabel 
is safe to use for all of our supported file systems, can they safely be 
mounted that way?


Thanks,

Doug

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