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SubjectRe: DEVFSv50 and /dev/fb? (or /dev/fb/? ???)
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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