Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 7 Aug 1998 09:05:10 -0400 (EDT) | From | Stephen Frost <> | Subject | Re: DEVFSv50 and /dev/fb? (or /dev/fb/? ???) |
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On Thu, 6 Aug 1998, Anthony Barbachan wrote:
> >> I do not know about it similarity to other UNIX's (other than SUN/SCO) > but > >> /dev/sda is definately simple. As far a company goes they are not going > to > >> care if their drive is named /dev/sda or /dev/dsk/sd/c0t0d0u0 (whatever). > > > > Except that it is MUCH easier to find a physical disk if you know the > >controller and target id of it. > > True but this could also be done with /dev/c0t0l0 (c = controller, t = > target, l = LUN) And I was mainly arguing against the previous writer's > insistance that having equally cryptic names will help Linux compete in > business.
Except that you need slice in there somewhere, unless you wanted a directory for the /dev/c0t0l0, but that doesn't make much sense...
I don't think Linux would have any problem competeing for business if it used a /dev/c0t0d0u0 or whatever naming scheme, in fact I think it would help it to break into SUN shops. The /dev/sda naming scheme I feel would hurt when it comes to trying to get into businesses because it is very limited, and puts in place some rather hard limits.
> > >> will make a difference is in the user who is used to > A:,B:,C:,COM1,LPT1,etc. > >> This type of person would be more likely to curse not praise the > verbosely > >> complex names that devfs "perfers" to use. I agree that SCSI definately > >> needs a change to support large numbers of controllers and disks but most > >> other devices EIDE,floppies,serial ports, etc do not and changing their > >> current simple device names only (after the only device names are > removed, > >> which they will if devfs is added) breaks backward compatibility and adds > to > >> the complexity of a Linux system. BTW, devfs is not consistant, at least > >> not to Solaris and perhaps (I do not remember) not to Unixware either. > > > > Except that from what I understand it doesn't break backwards > > > It sort of does as if this is implemented then the old naming sceme will > probably be "depricated".
Perhaps, but it doesn't break it, which is I think what mainly matters, it's kind of like PCI vs. ISA, you'll note that ISA is phasing out because of PCI, but that's not neccissairly a bad thing. I realize that was a bad analogy and I'm not interested in a debate over PCI vs. ISA, just an analogy.
> >compatibility at all. EIDE I agree works okay the way it is w/ /dev/hda, > >but that's mainly because it's consistent and the /dev/hda access point > >doesn't change if you add or remove disks, it's directly associated w/ > >controller 0, master drive. Floppy drives are /dev/fd0, closer in my view > >to devfs already than /dev/sda is. > > > > Another issue, what happenes when a drive doesn't respond to > >SCSI probes? Happens all too often to me, and figuring out which drive > >died would be MUCH harder to do w/ /dev/sda than w/ /dev/c0t0d0s0, not > >impossible, but would certainly take a whole lot more time. > > > It would probably take a second to do > > dmesg | grep sda and read off the information > > or > > grep sda /var/adm/syslog and read off the information
Well, I would hope you'd be able to do a tail -20 /var/adm/syslog and see from there what drive died, perhaps in both /dev/sda and /dev/c0t0d0s0 format... I realize that's a big change, but that's something I'd want in there before I'd want to use dev_fs...
Stephen
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