Re: [gentoo-user] duplicate gentoo system - errors

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 5:54 AM Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
>
> > > Can you imagine an fstab with 22 partitions specified with UUIDs?
>
> > Can you imagine an fstab with 22 partitions?
>
> The NVMe drive, the main one, has 18;

So, if all the partitions are on one drive and that is the only drive
you have, there aren't many issues with using raw kernel device names
to identify them.  It isn't like a partition is just going to
disappear.

Once you have multiple disks, then UUIDs or labels become more
important, especially with a large number.  If you had a dozen disks
with dozens of partitions and tried to use kernel device names, then
anytime a device failed or was enumerated differently you'd have stuff
mounted all over the place.

That said, something like lvm is a good solution in almost all cases
(or something semi-equivalent like zfs/btrfs/etc which have similar
functionality built-in).  If I had that many partitions I'd hate to
deal with wanting to resize one, and with lvm that is pretty trivial.
You don't need to use UUIDs with lvm - they're basically equivalent to
labels.

Now, one area I would use UUIDs is with mdadm if you're not putting
lvm on top.  I've seen mdadm arrays get renumbered and that is a mess
if you're directly mounting them without labels or UUIDs.

-- 
Rich