On Mon, 2 Sep 2002 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
> > HOWEVER, that disk change checking really should be done by
> > the generic layers, and it should be done after the open() anyway
> > (and not by the open)
>
> Are you sure?
> I am inclined to think that this would be an undesirable change of
> open() semantics. Traditionally, and according to all standards,
> open() will return ENXIO when the device does not exist.
Well, one reason I don't want the low-level drivers doing the media change
checking is that there's more to media change than just checking the
media.
For example, the higher levels want to do a partition table re-read if the
media really has changed. We do have this strange "bd_invalidated" thing
for passing that information back, and maybe that is acceptable. It's a
bit subtle, though.
Another reason why it would be good to factor out media change from open()
is that I can well imagine that somebody would want to do a "door open"
ioctl on a device without a media, and we actually do kind of have that
interface: opening with O_NDELAY historically means to not do the media
change checks.
And guess what? Because that test is done inside the low-level driver
right now, it means that these O_NDELAY semantics aren't actually known or
followed by most drivers, _and_ it means that the higher levels don't even
realize that sometimes the media check hasn't gotten done at all (ie
because the low-level "open()" is called only for the _first_ open, the
higher levels right now won't even call "open()" at _all_ later on and so
the media checks aren't done later when they should be).
However, your ENXIO point is a good one, and implies that we really should
have a more expressive "media_change()" function, so that if we'd factor
out open()/media_check(), then we'd still get the right ENXIO thing.
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 07 2002 - 22:00:16 EST