Re: disk naming proposal & devfs

Randolph Bentson (bentson@grieg.holmsjoen.com)
Mon, 12 Jan 1998 08:52:59 -0800


I feel I have to weight in on this issue. It seems that the
floodgates have opened and a rush of ideas has come forth.
What bothers me is that some of the most recent have been proposed
without much consideration for the general case, i.e., they solve
localized problems.

The one which triggered my note was a proposal to have the kernel
take some kind of automatic action based on data stored in a special
place on the disk. It sort of begs the question "how do you address
a disk which hasn't been labeled?"

I'd like to see a retreat back to the proposals which deal with
the physical device naming only. (Disk partitions are well
enough established in the industry that they can be regarded
as hardware/firmware--provided the raw disk is also available.)
Software which looks on the disk for partition labels can be
part of the startup sequence--but only as user level programs.

Randolph Bentson