Actually, CD-ROMs have (one or more) sessions, which can be very
effectively treated as partitions. I would love to have a
multisession CD-ROM where I could mount any session I wanted. Let's
face it -- CD-ROMs are just removable, read-only disks with a couple
of quirks.
Tape drives and generic-SCSI are character devices, whereas disks and
CD-ROM are block devices. The former we could easily distinguish by a
bit in the minor.
>=20
> My main objection to the dynamic major idea is that it still leaves
> potential problems with devices being remapped to different major num=
bers
> if you move controller cards around. Some utility like scsidev would=
still
> be required to maintain the /dev entries that correspond to the dynam=
ic
> majors. If people don't mind this level of inconvenience, then I hav=
e
> no problem with it, but I thought the point of this exercise was to t=
ry and
> see whether we could completely get away from dynamic assignment of d=
evice
> numbers.
>=20
Let's face it... we'll never get people to actually use *device names*
that incorporate bus information; they are simply too long. On
Solaris, which has such names, *everyone* uses the
dynamically-assigned "short" equivalent (the controller part is dynamic=
.)
> Also, there are some people who would like to have one common
> major number for *all* cdrom drives on the system (ide, scsi, etc).
> A top level driver would essentially dispatch through a table down to
> whatever the appropriate driver is to do the job. Dynamic majors tak=
e
> us further from this, although a sort of virtual device driver would
> probably also do the job here.
The people that call for that are basically the ones that want all
CD-ROMs on the same major (i.e. /dev/cdrom would be a bona fide
device.) I personally think it is useless -- that can be done by a
boot script if desired -- but there probably should be a uniform way
to find which devices correspond to actual CD-ROM, tape etc. devices.
-hpa
--=20
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