Re: VPD in sysfs

[Luben Tuikov]

Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> I've been sent a patch that reads some VPD from the Symbios NVRAM and
> displays it in sysfs.  I'm not sure whether the way the author chose
> to present it is the best.  They put it in 0000:80:01.0/host0/vpd_name
> which seems a bit too scsi-specific and insufficiently forward-looking
> (I bet we want to expose more VPD data than that in the future, so we
> should probably use a directory).
>
> I actually have a feeling (and please don't kill me for saying this), that
> we should add a struct vpd * to the struct device.  Then we need something
> like the drivers/base/power/sysfs.c file (probably drivers/base/vpd.c)
> that takes care of adding vpd to each device that wants it.
>
> Thoughts?  Since there's at least four and probably more ways of getting
> at VPD, we either need to fill in some VPD structs at initialisation or
> have some kind of vpd_ops that a driver can fill in so the core can get
> at the data.

I like this idea.  Certain VPD parameters are standard across SCSI devices,
so they could be shown in a standard way.

Not sure on the format of vpd_ops, _but_ getting the VPD data via
the EVPD bit in INQUIRY, could be pretty standard method, so that
if the LLDD doesn't set vpd_ops, they could be set to point to
the (this) generic way*. (The LLDD can snoop the INQUIRY data if
it wishes to, for further control.)

*I.e. the vpd_ops method(s) would be generic enough to abstract out
the actual method of getting the VPD...

Certainly, providing a vpd node in sysfs would help user level
apps id devices more easily.  This could also be used by multipathing
sofware and other apps.  I think it's a good idea.

			Luben


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