[SGVLUG] Swap labels

[Dustin]

On Sun, 18 Sep 2005, John E. Kreznar wrote:

> awakening at least me to this useful functionality), I looked it up in
> /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.11/Documentation and found only that it
> may not work with devfs.

Yeah, well, devfs is dead dead dead.  No big limitation. :-)

I think it is useful, though most people don't mess with their
configuration that much.  Right now the best use I know if is for crazy
people: if you run a lot of distros, it's nice to be able to have labels
like the following:

	SWAP
	/HOME

	DSL/
	VECTOR/
	DEB/
	SLACK/
	LFS/

so that each distro mounts it's own root partition and the shared /home
and swap partitions by label.  Then if you delete, say, small partitions
for DSL/ and VECTOR/ and combine them into a big partition (say GENTOO/,
with enough room to compile KDE and OOo), the partition numbers for
Debian, Slackware, and LFS all change but they can still mount / properly.
Saves a tedious ten minutes with Knoppix, if nothing else.

Few people have that kind of madness, I admit. :-)

But consumer-level hot-swappable disks will potentially change everything.  
They're not fast enough that you'd want to run your system or your swap on
them yet, but they will be.  Then it will probably be almost mandatory, at
least if drive lettering isn't given some sort of persistent naming
scheme.  I already have had some annoyances when a cardreader would get
mounted as a different drive letter depending on which USB port I plugged
it into (I forget how I solved that--udev rule, maybe?).

Actually, I think both will happen.

Dustin