It's a Tecra 780 DVD laptop, with a docking station.
Someone mentioned that one does not tend to shuffle either SCSI or IDE controllers, still less with the power on.
Well, my machine has two IDE controllers in the laptop, and an IDE and SCSI controller in the docking station. It also has two PCI busses in the laptop, and another one in the docking station, and even a PCI to ISA bridge in the
docking station! Just to add confusion, it also has four pcmcia slots, two of which are in the docking station.
All it's IDE devices, except for the main hard disk, are hot pluggable. So is the floppy drive.
The docking station is hot pluggable!
(meaning that I can have a PCI and an ISA bus, an IDE controller, a SCSI controller and two pcmcia slots disappear without warning to the OS, while it is running. Obviously, linux does not support this too well. devfs would
provide at least some help, although correctly dealing with active devices requires eject support from the OS, so it can delay the eject until it has had a chance to do something sensible with the drivers.)
How can you possibly expect to sensibly deal with this machine with a static naming scheme?
I can't now, I just don't reconfigure my hardware certain ways and everything continues to work.
The drive device my CDROM gets depends on whether it's in the docking station or in the laptop as it is. I always just leave it in the laptop while I'm using linux, which solves it for now, but imagine if I had some SCSI disks in
the station and used a pcmcia SCSI card or two...
devfs to the rescue?
Andrew McGregor
Tecra 780 linux support volunteer
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