Re: no need for a devfs

James Mastros (root@jennifer-unix.dyn.ml.org)
Thu, 8 Jan 1998 17:26:56 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Richard Gooch wrote:
James Mastros writes: (Me)
On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Phil Brutsche wrote: (PB)
On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Richard Gooch wrote: (RG)
RG> Thank you, Pavel. The running of makedev every time a module is
RG> loaded/unloaded is likely to be *much* slower than devfs.
RG>
RG> And I certainly have SCSI disc naming in my sights... With devfs you
RG> can have both the old-style /dev/sd{a,b,c} as well as something like
RG> the Solaris
RG>
RG> /dev/hHcCiIlLpP
[...]
RG>
RG> The SCSI disc driver will call dev_register() whenever a new disc is
RG> found. It probably makes sense to do it right after the partition
RG> check, so you only create device nodes for as many partitions as you
RG> have. Done properly when you use <fdisk> to write a new partition
RG> table, dev_register() is called again (and possibly dev_unregister()).

Sorry, I over-scaned: I didn't notice that though the subject is "devfs not
neccessary", we are talking about SCSI disk naming WITH DEVFS.

[...]
RG> The incosistency can be considered a bad thing. Unless some change is
RG> planned for the IDE subsystem (along the same lines) consistency is a good
RG> thing.
Me> Umm... the IDE subsystem is already like this. We have
Me> hda - 1st channel, master
Me> hdb - 1st channel, slave
Me> hdc - 2nd channel, master
Me> hdd - 2nd channel, slave
Me> ...
Me>
Me> Then you follow those with a number indicating the paritition. The
Me> difference between current SCSI practice and IDE is this: If you take out
Me> hdb, hdc remains hdc. But if you remove sdb, sdc becomes sdb.
RG>
RG> That's right. And it's a pain.

Huha? In what way? I like being able to disconnect my cdrom (which was hdb,
due to cable length), which was causing inablity to boot (its ICs appear to
be fried) withought moving my /usr partition (hdc2). The naming of the
partitons is somwhat annoying, but ahvell.

[...]

-=- James Mastros

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