To discuss this subject, I've still wanted to set up a discussion with at least Marco, you, Joey and Colin, but for different reasons have not gotten around to that. As I'll be on holiday for a few weeks after Debconf, let me at least list the issues that I've had in mind and that should be considered when implementing changes for persistent device naming. Please add to the list and comment. - We should like to keep support for devfs and regular device names in the installer; loosing that would mean no support for 2.2/2.4 installs (although those are likely to be dropped anyway) and no support for installs of Sarge and I think may be a problem for debian-edu. However, if it is unavoidable, we could drop this requirement. - Are there likely to be architecture specific issues with persistent device naming? - Or with filesystems other than ext2/ext3? - Persistent device naming is mostly needed to get rid of errors on reboot. Most common case is where a system has multiple disk controllers and the order in which their drivers are loaded is different after the reboot than in d-i leading to a different order in device names. - A special case is for installations from usb-stick in combination with a scsi or SATA harddisk controller. In that case d-i will see the USB stick as the first SCSI controller (sda) and the real SCSI/SATA harddisks will come after that. This also results in errors on reboot as the grub setup and fstab will be incorrect as then the usb stick will not be present and sda will be assigned to the real disk controller. Similar cases for installs to any kind of external disk drive. It seems to me that persistent device naming will probably fix fstab in this case, but possibly not the grub configuration. - Probably unrelated, but worth mentioning. If the user installs to hdb and has BIOS set to boot from hdb, the grub configuration will be incorrect. (Same for hdc, hdd of course.) - The last two issues are somewhat related and could maybe be solved by detecting this situation and asking the user which device the system will boot off. There are a number of bug reports against grub-installer about these two issues. - Identify where changes will be needed. This will be at least partman and will probably include most bootloader installers. Cheers, FJP
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