Re: DEVFSv50 and /dev/fb? (or /dev/fb/? ???)

Anthony Barbachan (barbacha@trill.cis.fordham.edu)
Thu, 6 Aug 1998 05:41:19 -0400


>On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, Terry L Ridder wrote:
>> Do I like the way /dev/sd? is rearranged when I pull a hard drive out
>> of the SCSI expansion box? Well no, but I have learned to live with
>> it for the time being. I have repeated posted stating that the Linux
>> Community has roughly 3 months to design an enhancement to increase
>> the SCSI drive limit, and deal with files > 2GB on Intel hardware.
>
>This is where I agree. I do, however, think the consistant nature of the
>devfs naming scheme will help vendors adapt to linux. As simple as
>the /dev/sd shit is, it isn't similar to ANYTHING else. The devfs is more
>like other standards than the /dev/sd scheme. IMHO, it needs help, as you
>admit.
>

I do not know about it similarity to other UNIX's (other than SUN/SCO) but
/dev/sda is definately simple. As far a company goes they are not going to
care if their drive is named /dev/sda or /dev/dsk/sd/c0t0d0u0 (whatever).
This will not affect companies one way or another; other than the fact that
/dev/sda saves a few seconds typing and prevent alot of typos. (Note: very
few, if not any, Sun/SCO admins that I know easily remember the device names
to their SCSI disks. Usually they curse and then look it up through vfstab
or /dev/dsk. This wastes some more minutes) Where naming can and probably
will make a difference is in the user who is used to A:,B:,C:,COM1,LPT1,etc.
This type of person would be more likely to curse not praise the verbosely
complex names that devfs "perfers" to use. I agree that SCSI definately
needs a change to support large numbers of controllers and disks but most
other devices EIDE,floppies,serial ports, etc do not and changing their
current simple device names only (after the only device names are removed,
which they will if devfs is added) breaks backward compatibility and adds to
the complexity of a Linux system. BTW, devfs is not consistant, at least
not to Solaris and perhaps (I do not remember) not to Unixware either.

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