Re: Devfs, was Re: Migrating to larger numbers

Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Wed, 9 Jun 1999 09:51:46 +1000

Alan Cox writes:
> > > What /dev admin maintenance? Perhaps my machines don't have enough disks,
> > > but I have never needed to perform significant work in /dev.
> >
> > If you install a distribution that supports 100 SCSI discs, you need
> > 1600 entries in /dev just for that. If you decide you'll never have
> > more than 4 SCSI discs, you're free to delete the entries you don't
>
> Nod.
>
> Once you are managing large storage arrays you need a saner naming
> system. Not devfs though, although you can build it over devfs just
> fine - you end up needing mount by uuid/volume name. Anything else
> is just plain horrible to manage updates.

Ultimately I'd like to see proper volume-based mounting. Not UUIDs (as
Linus said to me privately, 128 bit numbers are ugly), but proper
names. Like "root", "usr", "local", "home", "data", "tmp", "swap" and
so on.

I'm still debating with myself whether volume names should be
registered with devfs. In other words, the code that determines volume
names registers them under /dev/volumes/

> devfs is an extremely clean solution to a problem. Im just not 100%
> sure its the right solution or the right problem. Its certainly in
> the right ballpark

Are your concerns related to the devfs concept or to the particular
naming scheme?

Regards,

Richard....

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