[pkg-cryptsetup-devel] UUID in fstab for device mapper devices?

[Ferenc Wagner]

Guido Günther <agx at sigxcpu.org> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 04:28:46PM +0200, Max Vozeler wrote:
> 
>> we recently changed d-i (partman-target, to be precise) to use 
>> UUIDs in fstab in order to get stable device naming. [...]
>> Since then, we concluded that it is preferable to go back to plain
>> /dev/mapper/ paths for LVM LVs because those already provide stable 
>> device naming (and are more descriptive).

And filesystem UUIDs are pretty useless as soon as you start using LVM
snapshots, dd backups or multipath for example.

> ENV{DM_UUID}=="mpath-*", \
> 	SYMLINK+="disk/by-id/$env{DM_TYPE}-$env{DM_NAME}"
> [...]
>
> This is what should idealy be used in d-i for multipath device naming.
> We could then start to remove the hacks that use /dev/mapper/mpath* to
> reference multipath devices then.

My limited experience shows that multipath uses unique /dev/mapper/<WWID>
device names by default, or the configured name, as Bastian mentioned.
Is that because I'm lucky, and other types of multipaths don't behave
so nice?  Also, I haven't seen mpath-names apart from an obscure
multipath.conf option...

Anyway, an unfortunate multipath/LVM interaction should also be
considered: without special configuration in lvm.conf, the PV scan
finds the LVM metadata on the individual paths as well as on the
multipath device, then tries to create mappings straight onto the
first path, skipping the multipath layer.  Of course it fails, because
that device isn't available any more, but the error is rather hard to
diagnose from the initramfs prompt.
-- 
Regards,
Feri.