UUIDs on drives

[Brian McKee]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 3:51 PM, ghe <ghe at slsware.com> wrote:
<snipped interesting discussion points>

Glen - let me throw some cases at you to prove why anything fixed at
the device layer just isn't going to work.

What if you have two identical model controllers in your computer?
Which one gets scanned first is unpredictable by anybody...

How about redundant iSCSI SAN devices?  What drive letter are you
going to reserve for them?

What if the first harddrive on the scsi bus doesn't have the OS on it,
and you remove it?
First how incidentally?  By id#? channel?  What happens when a RAID array fails?

How exactly can you tell the difference between a picture frame, an
MP3 player and a USB stick?  They're probably using the same chipset
anyways....

Mac doesn't do it by fixed position AFAIK incidentally.  I believe EFI
scans for all possible bootable drives, then if it finds the one
that's the same one as it was told to boot from next it will do so,
otherwise it picks the 'next' one it finds,  and that order can change
depending on what you plug in when.

Identifying the file system at the file system level uniquely is the
only solution I can think of that deals with all this mess of
different devices that appear at different times and places.
Computing is a very mobile flexible world and the solutions need to
reflect that.