i’ve just had a read of this article on the wiki
very interesting
if you’re having trouble managing the raw devices before any levels of meaningfu abstraction come into play, why not make the devices themselves responsible for that task?
and, yes, i know you can’t go chaning drive firmware, but if btrfs is grabbing hold of the device well before the OS gets its hands on it shouldn’t it be possible to create a “btrfs” partition?
reserve some space on the drive and implement a pull mechanism that includes a history of the machines it’s been in, security rules, data importance, what roles it’s had, pools, shares et al
make the drive a repository of the meta-data that btrfs seems to be keeping in its db somewhere
this would allow boot safe unique identification but also allow transposition of drives within a server cluster if the metadata were to flow up some sort of data tree within the cluster
just a thought