This is actually a separate issue from devfs in some ways. While it
would make use of devfs, devfs itself wouldn't care it: it's just
another legitimate use of devfs.
BTW: being able to mount SCSI discs based on hardware position rather
than index of discs found has been quite useful. I recently had my
boot disc (ID=0) start to give errors. With devfs I was able to remove
and insert my dying disc without the need to edit /etc/fstab every
time. Reconfiguring was a fairly painless process.
With the old numbering scheme this would have been a nightmare (I have
4 discs each with several partitions). In the past doing this sort of
work has caused me no end of fustration.
> Haven't heard anything recently about it.
That's because devfs hasn't made it into the mainstream kernel yet:
I'm still waiting for a few patches to tidy some things up before I
submit it to Linus. Once devfs is in the mainstream kernel, someone is
welcome to write a patch to support volume labels.
Furthermore, if someone wants to start hacking on that now, and have
it included in devfs or kept as an additional patch, they are free to
do so :-)
For interest, I've appended the current ToDo list for devfs. Feel free
to send me items that should be added to the list (preferably with a
volunteer to do the work).
Regards,
Richard....
===============================================================================
Device File System (devfs) ToDo List
Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au>
5-FEB-1998
This is a list of things to be done for better devfs support in the
Linux kernel. If you'd like to contribute to the devfs, please have a
look at this list for anything that is unallocated. Also, if there are
items missing (surely), please contact me so I can add them to the
list (preferably with your name attached to them:-).
- create /proc/devlist (maybe), with a format like:
name type perm user group class
(class should be "disk", "audio" and so on)
Me
- write man pages for devfs functions
Me
- change generic/IDE disc driver to have names like SCSI discs
Thanks to Nicholas J. Leon <nicholas@binary9.net>
- >256 ptys
Thanks to C. Scott Ananian <cananian@alumni.princeton.edu>
- SoundBlaster cdrom support
Thanks to C. Scott Ananian <cananian@alumni.princeton.edu>
and Andrzej Krzysztofowicz <ankry@idk.com.pl>
- Uniform CD-ROM support
Thanks to Erik Andersen <andersen@inconnect.com>
- Hide unopened virtual consoles from directory listings
Thanks to C. Scott Ananian <cananian@alumni.princeton.edu>
-
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