retiring device.map

[Robert Millan]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 06:31:06AM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> 
> I would explore the possibility of retiring device.map completely or
> limiting its use to some rare cases.
> 
> In the vast majority of cases, the installer should not rely on knowing
> the BIOS numbers of the devices involved in the boot process.  BIOS
> provides the boot drive, which should generally be trusted.  The
> installer only needs to know whether the media is a hard drive to enable
> a workaround for buggy BIOSes providing a wrong boot drive.
> 
> I'm not sure about EFI and Open firmware, but I think the situation is
> similar.  There should be enough information to find the boot drive at
> the boot time without requiring any guesswork in the installer.
> 
> We may need to tell GRUB what device to use to look for additional files
> when the boot process involves more than one drive.  But even then, I'd
> rather prefer that GRUB uses labels, not hardcoded BIOS numbers.

I completely agree.  How do we go about this?  First of all we need support
for labels, right?

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What use is a phone call… if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)