Banishing UUIDs from grub
What is the recommended method for preventing grub from using UUIDs to
refer to filesystems in the current Debian stable distribution?
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In an attempt to head off a "but you really want to use UUIDs!" debate:
The specific use-case I'm dealing with here is cloned virtual machines.
When I clone them, the virtual disks' UUIDs are cleared and new UUIDs
are assigned, which is as it should be. However, this causes the first
boot to fail because grub can't find the UUID it wants to boot from,
requiring me to manually boot the system through the grub rescue shell.
Once the cloned VM is up and running, I can run grub-install to fix it,
but the use of UUIDs prevents the cloned VMs from booting unattended
until this is done. If grub were to try to boot from lvm/system[1]
instead of lvm/UUID, that would remove the need for per-machine manual
intervention.
[1] ...and it will always and forever be lvm/system. Removable media
and hardware which can autodetect in nondeterministic sequences are not
concerns here.
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Dave Sherohman
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