Re: devfs and /proc/ide/hda

From: AJ Lewis (lewis@sistina.com)
Date: Thu Mar 01 2001 - 09:41:33 EST


On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 04:10:23PM +0100, Guest section DW wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 08:52:54PM +1100, Glenn McGrath wrote:
>
> > Im running kernel 2.4.1, I have entries like /proc/ide/hda,
> > /proc/ide/ide0/hda etc irrespective of wether im using devfs or
> > traditional device names.
> >
> > Is always using traditional device names for /proc/ide intentional, or
> > is it something nobody has gotten around to fixing yet?
>
> If only humans look at /proc, and they like typing long names,
> then there is no objection against changing /proc.
> As it is, however, quite a few programs look at /proc for
> information about devices. I don't think it would be a good
> idea to "fix" /proc and simultaneously break all these programs.

What it should do is change based on whether devfs is mounted or not. It
doesn't make *any* sense to have /dev/ide/host0/foo/bar in your
/proc/partitions entries if you aren't mounting devfs. The /proc/partitions
entry is the only way I know of for something like LVM to determine which
devices to scan for Volume Groups. If you can't read /proc/partitions, it
has to attempt to scan all block devices it recognizes, regardless of
whether they are actually on the system or not. This can take several
minutes.

-- 
AJ Lewis
Sistina Software Inc.                  Voice:  612-379-3951
1313 5th St SE, Suite 111              Fax:    612-379-3952
Minneapolis, MN 55414                  E-Mail: lewis@sistina.com
http://www.sistina.com

Current GPG fingerprint = 3B5F 6011 5216 76A5 2F6B 52A0 941E 1261 0029 2648 Get my key at: http://www.sistina.com/~lewis/gpgkey (Unfortunately, the PKS-type keyservers do not work with multiple sub-keys)

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