Re: Drive identifiers

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi Ludo,

On Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:32:11 +0100
address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> Do GRUB, U-Boot, and co. provide a way to refer to drivers by serial
> number?

Not that I know of.  udev (and ID_SERIAL) is a relatively (10 years) recent 
invention.  I don't think there was a generic way to easily (without having a 
dozen different tools depending on the hardware type) get serial numbers before 
it.

I also don't think a bootloader would have all the necessary drivers to find 
that out either.

It would be nice, sure.  But once the bootloader is loaded (by the BIOS or ROM 
loader), it really doesn't need the whole-drive any more, just the partitions.  
And those have UUIDs right inside the partition on disk.

But if bootloaders do after all support drive serial numbers I'd like to hear 
it :)