Re: Device naming???

Lars Kellogg-Stedman (lars@bu.edu)
Wed, 21 Jul 1999 15:26:33 -0400 (EDT)


> How hard/bad would it be to make SUN style naming such as
> /dev/c0t1d0s0 and such work for /etc/fstab, lilo and such? This could
> make life easier and also safer. If you loose a scratch disk, it might
> not mount your backup disk over it and have a cron-job clean your
> backup files out for scratch space...

There's already one solution to this problem; the devfs filesystem will
give you a dynamic /dev with sensible device names based on bus and slot
information, rather than the arbitrary boot order method currently in use.

The current devfs patch can be found at:

http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~rgooch/linux/kernel-patches.html

There are people on this list who have very strong objection to the devfs
patch, enough such that there is little chance of it making it's way into
the kernel. If you read the archive you'll see both the pro and con
arguments for this patch.

I work primarily with Solaris and Irix workstations, both of which have
some form of filesystem/hardware mapping (/devices on Solaris mirrors the
Open Firmware device tree, and Irix (SGI) provides /hw).

I prefer this method over what Linux currently uses (I've been bitten by
drives not being present or not spinning up, too), and devfs appears to be
the only solution currently available.

-- Lars

-- 
Lars Kellogg-Stedman * lars@bu.edu * (617)353-5228
Department of Computer Science, Boston University

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