Re: devfs again, (was RE: USB device allocation)

david parsons (orc@pell.portland.or.us)
12 Oct 1999 12:34:48 -0700


In article <linux.kernel.199910100218.WAA25154@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl>,
Horst von Brand <vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl> wrote:
>Dan Hollis <goemon@sasami.anime.net> said:
>> On Fri, 8 Oct 1999, Horst von Brand wrote:
>> > Not my point, I was saying that I must now _also_ take care of not
>> > hijacking a name. But you don't have to mess with names if you don't use
>> > devfs. What if I decide to set up a full chinese version of Linux, with
>> > chinese device names? Now I can't even begin of thinking in using the stock
>> > kernel...
>
>> Which chinese version of Linux uses chinese device names? AFAIK most
>> (all?) distributions use the "standard" names, which is basically the same
>> as if it had been kernel policy anyway. Change device names at your own
>> peril -- many programs are hardcoded to fixed device names. (The kernel,
>> and init come to mind).
>
>None ATM. And device names hardcoded into the kernel is BAD, everyone
>agrees on that.

Except for, apparently, the people who write kernel code:

(edited dmesg output)
.
hda: HITACHI CDR-8130, ATAPI CDROM drive
.
SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 8925000 [4357 MB] [4.4 GB]
SCSI device sdb: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 8467200 [4134 MB] [4.1 GB]
.
Partition check:
sda: sda1 sda2
sdb: sdb1 sdb2
.
lp1 at 0x0378, (polling)
.
tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
tty03 at 0x02e8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
.
eth0: DEC 21040 Tulip at 0xdc00, 00 80 c6 03 6e 9b, IRQ 10
.

If my scsi disks are /dev/scsi/disk/0, /dev/scsi/disk/1, /dev/scsi/disk/2,
I'll still need to do mapping between this kernel-provided namespace
and my namespace to make sense of the kernel messages. If, as there is
when I'm running a 2.3.x kernel, a devfs present, the existance of this
namespace would does not invalidate my custom namespace, except that I
can then do similarly to what Solaris and Irix do and convert
/dev/scsi/disk/0 into a symlink to /hw/sda

To do any sort of device notifier, whether it be devfs or the
unworkable devd kludge, there needs to be a kernel namespace. We
already have two of them (the human-readable names listed above and
the major/minor black magic that's the traditional Unix approach),
so the badness of them is not a given.

____
david parsons \bi/ without a namespace, it's really hard to talk to
\/ anything.

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