Re: magic device renumbering was -- Re: Linux 2.4.2ac20

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolinux.com>]

Lars writes:
> > Put LABEL=<label set with e2label> in you fstab in place of the device name.
> 
> Which is great, for filesystems that support labels.  Unfortunately,
> this isn't universally available -- for instance, you cannot mount
> a swap partition by label or uuid, so it is not possible to completely
> isolate yourself from the problems of disk device renumbering.

There is room for a LABEL and/or UUID in the swap superblock, if you
would want to implement support for this.  I took a look once, and it
should be possible to add in a compatible way.  Of course, you can
always put swap into LVM, which also makes it (along with filesystems
other than ext2) immune from the nasty device name changes.

Cheers, Andreas
-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert