Re: devfs

Kevin Lentin (kevinl@cs.monash.edu.au)
Sun, 18 Jan 1998 12:35:39 +1100

On Thu, Jan 15, 1998 at 05:47:45PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
>
> sdc: sdc1 <solaris: [s0] sdc5 [s1] sdc6 [s3] sdc7 [s5] sdc8 [s6] sdc9 >
>
> showing I have one MS-DOS partition on sdc1 containing my solaris slices.
>
> I haven't actually got around to looking at the devfs patches yet. When I do
> I'll try to hammer the solaris x86 slice recognition code into a form which
> can be used by devfs. You can see that if one disc has both solaris and linux
> extended partitions, we rapidly run out of minor numbers.

This is where we should use p1s0 to refer to sdc5.
I still think that the device names should reflect the nature of the disk.
So the sdc1 partition should be xxxxxxp1, it's slices are xxxxxxp1s0,
xxxxxxp1s0, etc. And if there weren't any slices then xxxxxxp1 is it.

We should NOT come up with a naming scheme that can name every device and
just fill in 0's. It just doesn't make sense. This is the perfect example
of why.

I suppose that somebody will retort with something about logical drives in
extended partitions needing a naming scheme so that what we now call hda5
becomes xxxxxxp1e1. I think that's silly. It just doesn't reflect how DOS
style partitions are used. But p1 should refer to the whole extended
partition and p5, p6, etc should be the logicals, exactly as we have
envisaged it so far.

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