From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG  Mon Jun 26 09:16:45 2006
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To: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org>
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:00:38 +0200."
	<20060626080038.GA12511@garage.freebsd.pl> 
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 08:43:14 +0000
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Cc: John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Accessing disks via their serial numbers. 
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In message <20060626080038.GA12511@garage.freebsd.pl>, Pawel Jakub Dawidek writ
es:

There is a not at all subtle difference between names which relate
to the contents of the disk (as for g_label) or names which relate
to a specific physical position (as for ATA_STATIC_ID) and what you
propose where the name binds to a specific drive mechanism.

The former two allows you to do offline copy/recovery and replacement
of a disk drive, the latter does not.

>Glabel(8) currently supports labeling any GEOM provider, but it steals
>the last sector, which is not always acceptable.

When is it not acceptable ?

And is this the only reason why you think we need serial numbers for
names ?

>[...], but we need to have a general
>mechanism inside the kernel for getting such informations.

This is a very broad statement, and I don't agree (yet).

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.