Which distros use UUID partition addressing

Nick_C · 03-08-2012, 11:08 AM

Apart from having to install each one and looking at fstab can anyone let me know which distros use UUIDs and which use traditional partition addressing?

I know some installs can supposedly be modified to use UUIDs but I have not had much success with doing that. Hence looking to establish which use UUIDs by default for partition addressing.

Thanks,

TobiSGD · 03-08-2012, 11:21 AM

Every Debian based distro (including the Ubuntu derivatives) should use UUIDs, Slackware does not (but should be easy to adapt), IIRC Arch also use the conventional device descriptors. I don't know much about the RPM distros, so I can't say.

Nick_C · 03-08-2012, 11:29 AM

Thanks Tobi,

I know that CentOS and Fedora actually do use UUIDs, I didn't realise that Ubuntu and Debian based distros did as well. So maybe only Slackware based ones that don't then.

jefro · 03-08-2012, 02:57 PM

Many offer the installer a choice if you know where to look for it. Not usually a common selection. Opensuse has it sort of hidden to change but default to disk by id.

syg00 · 03-08-2012, 06:35 PM

UUID (plus other symlinks) in fstab can be used by any distro.

Some time ago - generally around when the libata changes went through that changed device naming from /dev/hd? to /dev/sd? - (some) distros decided it was all too had to educate their users and "forced" them to use UUID or LABEL.
This was a choice, not something they "hacked" to make happen.
However, patches were needed for (classic) grub to support UUID/LABEL in the menu stanzas. This is not true for grub2, as it supports them natively.