e2label suggestions

From: Jeff V. Merkey
Date: Tue Mar 28 2006 - 15:54:54 EST



e2label takes as parms:

e2label <device name> <mount point>

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.

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.

On many systems, including the systems we ship, /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and /dev/sdc are dynamically created from 3Ware RAID arrays and the boot drive
on the SATA connectors of the motherboard tends to "float" (i.e. sdc can move to sda or sdb between boots depending on how the arrays are configured).
On a RAID 0 failure, by way of example, sdc becomes sdb and renders a system unable to boot. The solution is to setup the initial scanning for root to look for the "/" assignment from e2label, and dynamically assign the /dev/sdX handle from this scanning.

Just a suggestion.

Jeff


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