Re: [RESEND PATCH 1/2] init: Add support for root devices to bespecified by partition name

From: Kay Sievers
Date: Fri Jan 07 2011 - 10:13:48 EST


On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 12:42, Kirill Smelkov <kirr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Â[ In follow-up to b5af921e ]
>
> Besides GUIDs, there are also partition names stored in an EFI GPT
> partition table. So let's add support for root to be located not only by
> GUID, but also by partition names, like this:
>
> Â Âroot=PARTNAME=<partition-name>

Are you sure about this? What's your use case?

Generally, we really don't recommend ever to use any simple labels for
critical stuff -- not from filesystems, not from partitions.

I know that some distros did that, but this is pretty misguided, and I
think, should not be extended to any new facility, unless there is a
good use case for that.

Labels are not unique and in the general case absolutely not useful to
uniquely identify data on a disk. They only make sense for humans, or
interfaces that visualize things -- they should usually not be used in
any environment that reliably needs to identify a certain partition.
We have the uuids for a reason.

Kay
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