> > I'd prefer something like:
> > /dev/dsk/at0d0a
>
> Look in /dev/discs/
>
> Or, use devfsd to get nicer names.
Or, to elaborate:
Devfs provides several ways of managing your device name space, and
there are alternatives to /dev/scsi/host0/.../lun0/part3.
(1) The /dev/discs hiearchy contains symlinks to each of your disk
devices as /dev/discs/disc0, /dev/discs/disc1, etc. These may
point to either scsi or ide disks (and, presumably, to others, but I
only have scsi and ide on my system). They are named in the order the
devices were scanned by the kernel during the boot process, and
correspond roughly to /dev/hda or /dev/sda, etc., under the older
system. If you're not going to be shuffling disks around, this means
you can use this:
/dev/discs/disc0/part1
Instead of (e.g.),
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target1/lun0/part1
Of course, this means you lose some of the advantages that devfs gives
you.
(2) devfsd can do a number of nifty things. One of those things is
automatically creating device aliases when new device nodes are added
to devfs. Using the MKNEWCOMPAT option, for instance, scsi disks might
look like:
/dev/sd/c1b0t1u0
/dev/sd/c1b0t1u0p7
and so forth.
To make this work, you'd have something like the following in your
/etc/devfsd.conf file:
REGISTER scsi/.* MKNEWCOMPAT
UNREGISTER scsi/.* RMNEWCOMPAT
And make sure you start devfsd as part of your boot process (I do this
from rc.sysinit on a RedHat system).
I think devfs is a wonderful thing, and I've been using it for a year
or so, but I agree that the documentation could use some help. I've
already submitted some man page patches to Mr. Gooch; while they
haven't yet been acknowledged I hope that they do make it in and help
make things clearer.
-- Lars
=====
lars@larsshack.org --> http://www.larsshack.org/
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 23 2000 - 21:00:24 EST