Re: devfs patch v3

Kevin Lentin (kevinl@cs.monash.edu.au)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 17:27:18 +1100

On Sun, Jan 11, 1998 at 06:49:04AM -0500, Dave Cinege wrote:
> Long ago I brought this up and also was looking for a way to access
> partitions by their label (which FAT, and ext2 support). This removes the
> possibility of partition shift and an unbootable/screwed up system if the
> disks get changed.

One problem (even with my solution which was to store a table on the disk)
is that, in the case of a kerneld system, the kernel doesn't know which
driver to probe to find a disk it doesn't know about. If I mount /dev/sda6,
the kernel knows to go get sd and scsi but if I mount /dev/usr it can have
no idea. And going and probing all possible devices half defeats the point
of kerneld. One possible solution is a mapping in conf.modules. Like
alias filesystem_device_usr sd
alias filesystem_device_mnt_cdrom sr

But it, once more, requires you to tell the system where the drives are
which defeats the purpose.

-- 
[======================================================================]
[     Kevin Lentin               Email: K.Lentin@cs.monash.edu.au      ]
[   finger kevinl@fangorn.cs.monash.edu.au for PGP public key block.   ]
[  KeyId: 06808EED    FingerPrint: 6024308DE1F84314  811B511DBA6FD596  ]
[======================================================================]