Re: Xen root filesystem on disk with gpt partitions

[Robert Nestor <rnestor%mac.com@localhost>]

Since the time of NetBSD-9 (9.2 for sure), if a GPT wedge doesn’t have a label attached, i.e. it isn’t named, the system will fallback and allow you to use the GUID that was uniquely generated for the wedge as a “name”.  This trick doesn’t work if you’ve actually labeled the wedge with a name though, and unfortunately it isn’t supported for specifying the root partition in an Xen startup as Manual noted (that would be great if supported though).

So if the bootable wedge on the disk shows:
	Details for index 2:
	Start: 67584 (33M)
	Size: 1572864 (768M)
	Type: ffs (49f48d5a-b10e-11dc-b99b-0019d1879648)
	GUID: fd9053d8-b4b8-474c-9dbe-7a69ba394c1d
	Label: 
	Attributes: biosboot, bootme

Then putting this into /etc/fstab works:
	NAME=fd9053d8-b4b8-474c-9dbe-7a69ba394c1d   /               ffs     rw    1 1

The nice thing about this approach is since the GUID’s are unique there’s no confusion during boot if there are multiple disks which may have been labeled with identical names.