This is an excellent idea. I would expand upon it in the following
way:
suppose we had two things, a serial number and a mount point.
Sort of like disk12345 and /usr. If we stored both of these on the
disk (we already do, I think, I'll bet every disk has a serial number
and every disk has been mounted at some time and that mount point is
typically stored in the superblock - at least UFS does that and all
filesystems should).
At boot time, you go find all the mount points and you allow people to
have fstabs that just say
/usr ext2
and the right things happens. What happens if some bozo mounts
a tmp disk on /usr and then unmounts so you have two /usrs?
That's what the serial numbers are for. /usr is really a partially
qualified name. You can always say mount /usr.disk1234 and you get
that disk.
Comments?
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--- Larry McVoy lm@sgi.com http://reality.sgi.com/lm (415) 933-1804 Copyright 1996, all rights reserved. Microsoft Network is prohibited from redistributing this work in any form, in whole or in part without license. License to distribute this work is available to Microsoft at $500. Transmission without permission constitutes an agreement to these terms.