Time to lay it to rest, but here's a way for folks to live with 'd'
and 's'. Think 'd == device, s == subdevice' and assign whatever
meaning is consistent for a particular type of device. In the
System III/V way of naming things, 'd' was never intended to represent
'disk'. The original meaning of 's' is a bit more obscure, and 'slice'
was at least as common an interpretation as 'subdevice' as I remember
it. Regardless, 'stripe' or 'strip' wasn't one of the valid meanings.
In my mind at least, there's a natural correlation between a
subdevice and a partition, and 's' isn't as limited as 'p' if/when
you want to apply the naming scheme to a device that doesn't have
partitions.
An example: for SCSI devices, '(d)evice == LUN'.
One more example: ESDI disks. On the old 3B2 computers with ESDI
disks, a SCSI target ID (t1-t7, t0 was reserved for the host adapter)
corresponded to a SCSI <--> ESDI controller (Everex) that could
support up to four spindles (d0-d3). Simple math implies you could
hang up to 28 spindles off a single SCSI host adapter if you were
crazy enough to put up with the I/O bottleneck.
The ESDI example in particular is why I would prefer 'd' to 'u', but
I can live with 'u' if that's the consensus.
-- Bob Tracy | If you have any trouble sounding condescending, Firewall Security Corp. | find a Unix user to show you how it's done. rct@frus.com | -- Scott Adams: DNRC Newsletter 3.0