Switching to by-label mounting of partitions

[Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org>]

Hi,

When using d-i on my sparc box I have to use the firmware loading feature
in order to make the firmware for the SCSI controller available to the
installer, otherwise the disks are not detected. A minor annoyance is that
once you insert the USB flash drive with firmware, it's assigned 'sda' as
as a device name, and then the real disk gets 'sdb'. This causes problems
later, as /dev/sdb2 is listed as root device in /etc/fstab and /etc/silo.conf.
If one tries to boot without the flash drive inserted later, the real
disk is recognized as 'sda' instead of 'sdb', causing a boot failure, as
the filesystem cannot be found.

Today I tried to set the labels in the installer, and then manually edit
/etc/fstab and /etc/silo.conf at the end of installation, specifying the
devices by LABEL instead of device name. It appears to work fine, you
only need to quote the value for root put in silo.conf like this:

root="LABEL=root"

As the amount of users who are using the firmware loading feature is probably
non-negligible, it would be cool to get the installer to assign labels
by default to all partitions, and generate the /etc/fstab and bootloader
configs using labels. What do you think?

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov                                           jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/                      KeyID: C99E03CC