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Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:05:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: Jeremy Chadwick <jdc@koitsu.org>
Subject: Re: ata controller problem
In-Reply-To: <20121026163338.GA32286@icarus.home.lan>
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Cc: freebsd@edvax.de, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, schmidt@ze.tum.de
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On Fri, 26 Oct 2012, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

> Regarding this:
>
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2012-October/245862.html
>
> No no NO *NO*!
>
> I wish people would stop recommending this utter garbage.  There is
> absolutely no justification behind using the highly convoluted labelling
> mechanisms at multiple layers within FreeBSD.  There are 3 (possibly 4)
> different "label" mechanisms which do nothing but confuse the user, or
> cause other oddities/complexities.  Good grief, there is so much hard
> evidence on the mailing lists over the past 5 (maybe even 7?) years
> talking about the utter mess that is filesystem/device/geom/blahblah
> labels that to recommend this is borderline insane.

Hmm.  Six months to April 1?  Seriously, labels provide a simple, 
relocatable identification mechanism that works across machines.  If 
someone finds them confusing, it can be cleared up easily: use GPT 
labels when possible, otherwise use filesystem labels or glabel.

> The proper way to solve this problem is to user /boot/loader.conf
> tie-downs to assign each disk to each individual controllers' device
> number (e.g. ada0 --> scbus0 --> ahcich0, or whatever you want).  Please
> note I said ahcichX, not ahciX.  Different things.

Labels work on different machines or controllers without added 
configuration, and stay with the partition or filesystem.  Your static 
config appears to not share those properties.