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Before of this patch, we supported two methods to address a boot device:
1. Specifying root=/dev/hdXY, where X is a-z letter which corresponds to
a boot device, and Y as number from 1 to 16, to indicate the partition
number, which can be omitted to instruct the kernel to use a raw device
rather than a partition on a raw device.
2. Specifying root=PARTUUID: with a GUID string of a GUID partition. In
case of existing storage device with GPT partitions, this is most likely
the safest option to ensure booting from persistent storage.
While option 2 is more advanced and reliable, the first option has 2
caveats:
1. The string prefix "/dev/hd" doesn't mean anything beside a convention
on Linux installations, that was taken into use in Serenity. In Serenity
we don't mount DevTmpFS before we mount the boot device on /, so the
kernel doesn't really access /dev anyway, so this convention is only a
big misleading relic that can easily make the user to assume we access
/dev early on boot.
2. This convention although resemble the simple linux convention, is
quite limited in specifying a correct boot device across hardware setup
changes, so option 2 was recommended to ensure the system is always
bootable.
With these caveats in mind, this commit tries to fix the problem with
adding more addressing options as well as to remove the first option
being mentioned above of addressing.
To sum it up, there are 4 addressing options:
1. Hardware relative address - Each instance of StorageController is
assigned with a index number relative to the type of hardware it handles
which makes it possible to address storage devices with a prefix of the
commandset ("ata" for ATA, "nvme" for NVMe, "ramdisk" for Plain memory),
and then the number for the parent controller relative hardware index,
another number LUN target_id, and a third number for LUN disk_id.
2. LUN address - Similar to the previous option, but instead we rely on
the parent controller absolute index for the first number.
3. Block device major and minor numbers - by specifying the major and
minor numbers, the kernel can simply try to get the corresponding block
device and use it as the boot device.
4. GUID string, in the same fashion like before, so the user use the
"PARTUUID:" string prefix and add the GUID of the GPT partition.
For the new address modes 1 and 2, the user can choose to also specify a
partition out of the selected boot device. To do that, the user needs to
append the semicolon character and then add the string "partX" where X
is to be changed for the partition number. We start counting from 0, and
therefore the first partition number is 0 and not 1 in the kernel boot
argument.
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LUN address is essentially how people used to address SCSI devices back
in the day we had these devices more in use. However, SCSI was taken as
an abstraction layer for many Unix and Unix-like systems, so it still
common to see LUN addresses in use. In Serenity, we don't really provide
such abstraction layer, and therefore until now, we didn't use LUNs too.
However (again), this changes, as we want to let users to address their
devices under SysFS easily. LUNs make sense in that regard, because they
can be easily adapted to different interfaces besides SCSI.
For example, for legacy ATA hard drive being connected to the first IDE
controller which was enumerated on the PCI bus, and then to the primary
channel as slave device, the LUN address would be 0:0:1.
To make this happen, we add unique ID number to each StorageController,
which increments by 1 for each new instance of StorageController. Then,
we adapt the ATA and NVMe devices to use these numbers and generate LUN
in the construction time.
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