Re: [PATCH v4 0/2] [SCSI] Asynchronous event notificationinfrastructure

From: James Bottomley
Date: Mon Oct 29 2007 - 11:43:59 EST


On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 10:42 -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> This is the next revision of the SCSI event notification infrastructure
> patchset, enabling SATA Asynchronous Notification ("AN") for CD/DVD
> devices that support it.
>
> For devices that support SATA AN (only very recent ones do), this means
> that HAL and other userspace utilities no longer need to repeatedly poll
> the CD/DVD device to determine if the user has changed the media.
>
> This revision takes into account James' comments from earlier today,
> modulo the following notes:
>
> * I think the various event attributes should always be present,
> for all devices at all times. If various events are not supported,
> the attribute will of course return zero (false, not supported).

Actually, I don't think so. We have precedent for this in the transport
classes: if a device doesn't support a feature, we don't export the flag
for that feature through sysfs. This allows not only feature control,
but an immediate view of the device capabilities simply by viewing the
sysfs directory.

I think this functionality is very easy to layer in, so there's no
reason not to do it.

> * I do not think this work should be blocked behind a revamp
> of the attribute group interface.

Assuming gregkh or kay ack, it won't be.

> * I was slack and did not bother to implement the 'set' operation
> for the attributes. This can easily be done at a later time in a
> separate patch. It is not a merge stopper to have the driver
> exclusively control the event mask, rather than driver+sysfs.

James


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/