Re: UUID-based boot (Re: [PATCH] Environment block support for grub2)

[Bean]

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 12:43 AM, Robert Millan <address@hidden> wrote:
> Sorry for the delay; it was quite a bit of work as I got hit by a number of
> bugs here and there :-)
>
> Considering that the problem was quite similar to the "boot from LVM" issue
> we already knew about, I thought it'd be a good idea to start with that.
>
> Although not directly related, the patch at in "boot from LVM / RAID" mail I
> just sent would allow to easily boot via UUID as well.
>
> If we add a UUID-based disk driver (see "disk/fs_uuid.c" mail), then it's just
> a matter of increasing the grub_prefix size so that an UUID can fit in it, and
> adjusting the install scripts to do it.
>
> Here's a sample (untested) patch to illustrate it.

I take a quick look at your patch, the method should work, but i
remember okuji oppose embedding device name in prefix, don't know how
he look at it now.

>
> Then for the Vista use case, I suppose the remaining questions are if NTFS
> supports UUIDs (or otherwise we have to ressort to labels?), and if we can
> extract filesystem metadata from Windows (if possible without requiring that
> a Cygwin installation is present).

ntfs has a 64-bit serial number, it's not quite the same as uuid, but
it can be used to identify the partition.

-- 
Bean