Re: kernel-managed /dev, revisited
Keith Rohrer (kwrohrer@uiuc.edu)
Sun, 13 Jul 1997 01:20:19 -0500 (CDT)
And lo, Joseph Pranevich saith unto me:
> On 11 Jul 1997, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > > One of my biggest Linux pet peeves is having to reshuffle my !@#$@!
> > > /etc/fstab every time I reshuffle my drives. [I do know about
> > > Youngdale's tools for this] Running a news server means many SCSI ids,
> > > many SCSI hosts, and a lot of reshuffling, on into the night...
> >
> > Actually, I like Ted's idea better: Have the kernel scan the disk
> >
> > just mount them by name:
> At boot time, put simlinks (Or maybe even use the dcache :) ) for drive
> labels in something like /dev/volumes (this would have to be done AFTER
> mounting root, of course) Then, patch mount to also look in /dev/volumes
> when you aren't using /dev/* syntax.
A small ramdisk in /mnt/volumes (or some such place) would work, even if
root were still mounted RO at the time. Mount already follows symlinks very
properly (umount /dev/sda2; ln -s /dev/sda2 /tmp/foo; mount /tmp/foo /mntpt
is a no-op if the umount works and /mntpt is the original mount point, even
/etc/mtab sees /dev/sda2 not /tmp/foo), so all the support you need for a
little shell/perl hacking short of reading volume labels is already right
there. Now, if /proc/scsi/scsi only listed serial numbers...
Keith