Re: IDE-Floppy and devfs

From: Andreas Franck (afranck@gmx.de)
Date: Wed Oct 25 2000 - 17:35:44 EST


Hi together,

Paul Bristow wrote:
>
> I'll get on it. I just tidied up the previous patch for Clik! support
> and fixed the last bug so that *should* wrap up 2.2.x.

Wonderful, so I can hope for a good solution soon :-)

BTW (for Jens): I noticed some other removable device problems
with devfs as well: When a CD-ROM module is removed and reloaded,
the /dev/cdroms/cdrom? symlink disappears to reappear with a different
(higher) number attached.

This killed my wonderful automount system and forces me to enter the
full /dev/ide/[...]/cd path in my fstab.

This problem seems to be in the generic cdrom layer:

(in drivers/cdrom/cdrom.c:
int register_cdrom(struct cdrom_device_info *cdi)
{
        [...]
        static unsigned int cdrom_counter;
        
        [...]
        sprintf(vname, "cdrom%u", cdrom_counter++);
        [...]
}

After some further testing, It seems to me that the device layer really
isn't doing to well being confronted with removable media or modules.
Something should be done here IMHO, I still can't say what exactly.

Some ideas here:

* autonotification of media changes to the driver layer, which would for
example
  create the required partition entries for partitioned removable media

* more consistent interface to removable media, across IDE/SCSI/whatever
  boundaries - the unified cdrom driver is a nice example here, which
could
  be extended to a more general "removable media" layer, including
floppy disks.

* Options for autoeject on unmount, I'd really love this feature for our
PowerMac,
  where I always have to use "eject" to spit out a CD-ROM or floppy disk
(... no,
  Macs don't have an eject knob on their drives!)

* ...

Everything probably not a 2.4 thing :-) But I'd like to help
implementing any
of these, as far as time permits. And I suggest further advice from the
more
experienced gurus here...

Greetings,
Andreas

-- 
->>>----------------------- Andreas Franck --------<<<-
---<<<---- Andreas.Franck@post.rwth-aachen.de --->>>---
->>>---- Keep smiling! ----------------------------<<<-
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