Re: [PATCH -next 1/5] block: add disk sequence number

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 08:18:24PM +0000, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:02:38PM +0100, Matteo Croce wrote:
> > From: Matteo Croce <mcroce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > Add a sequence number to the disk devices. This number is put in the
> > uevent so userspace can correlate events when a driver reuses a device,
> > like the loop one.
> 
> Should this be documented as monotonically increasing?  I think this
> is actually a media identifier.  Consider (if you will) a floppy disc.
> Back when such things were common, it was possible with personal computers
> of the era to have multiple floppy discs "in play" and be prompted to
> insert them as needed.  So shouldn't it be possible to support something
> similar here -- you're really removing the media from the loop device.
> With a monotonically increasing number, you're always destroying the
> media when you remove it, but in principle, it should be possible to
> reinsert the same media and have the same media identifier number.

And we have some decent infrastructure related to media changes,
grep for disk_events.  I think this needs to plug into that
infrastructure instead of duplicating it.