For a variety of installation, using the UUID in the /etc/fstab and elsewhere is a good idea. The handbook would be greatly enhanced if it discussed when, where and how to use UUID on a new Gentoo installation, imho.
when WOULD you want to use that? i haven't seen anything to suggest using UUIDs over standard naming schemes.
(In reply to Josh Saddler from comment #1) > i haven't seen anything to suggest using UUIDs over standard naming schemes. The /dev/sd? may change on every booting on some systems.
The naming can indeed change at a not-so-convenient time. One of my home machines enumerates the SATA drives before going to an on-board CF card port. When I plug one more disk into the hotswap bay prior to boot, I would get a boot failure. FYI, Linux has supported the root=PARTUUID= this since 2.6.37 [1]. I don't recall how well Grub supports this, though. [1] http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_37#head-da4cb5f727d0f3b8fac1b23c097e15c3b49ff793
(In reply to Jan Kundrát from comment #3) > Linux has supported the root=PARTUUID= this since 2.6.37 [1]. PARTUUID is only a solution for a few systems since it does not work with MBR but only with GPT. There were patches suggested for the kernel supporting UUID, but AFAIK they never made it into the kernel. Thus, unfortunately, support for UUID on the kernel command line requires using an appropriate ramdisk. However, using it in /etc/fstab works always and should be sufficient for many cases. This bug apparently is mainly about the latter. > I don't recall how well Grub supports this, though. Again, I do not think that this bug is about grub/kernel but about /etc/fstab. However: legacy-grub does not support this IIRC. grub2 fully supports both (UUID and PARTUUID), and these are used by the grub.cfg-generating scripts even automatically, so no special description would be needed in the handbook. (But of course also using grub2 does not solve the situation concerning MBR on the kernel command line).
UUID, documented inthe installation process, or as an optional method would be foundational when one choose to build a RAID system or an embedded system. MDADM comes to mind.
I've added in the by-id/by-uuid information for fstab. I'm not touching the bootloader config for now though, I can hardly test that one out with my one system :-/ Paragraph should show up on the site in an hour or so.
