Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 5 May 1997 19:31:44 -0400 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: SCSI disk devices |
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Date: Sat, 3 May 1997 19:33:34 -0400 From: Eric Youngdale <eric@andante.jic.com>
If I get a clear indication that this is the direction we want to go, then scsidev can be cleaned up and enhanced (making it volume label aware is one enhancement I wanted to add, especially now that ext2 supports volume labels). It also should be made filesystem aware too, I think so that it can recognize various types of filesystems (this is a prerequisite to being able to snarf the volume labels).
I had always thought that the right approach would go far beyond scsidev; if you have a volume management daemon that would automatically do the right thing based on the volume ID (pretty much all filesystems have them now: ext2, iso9660, even MS-DOS FAT), then who cares what the device name is?
Have the volume management daemon take care of doing the filesystem checking, the mounting, even the backup of fixed disks. It could query the system for a list of block devices, and then probe each one looking for filesystems. When it found one, it would use an internal database to determine where a filesystem should be mounted (if it should be mounted).
You'd have a user interface client which could connect to the volume management daemon and get a list of available filesystems, which the user could mount (with certain restrictions to prevent this from turning into a security hole). This client would also be used to initially create filesystems --- the user interface could show the complete description of each of the devices, and how they were connected to the SCSI bus, with nice long verbose names to describe the SCSI adaptor and the SCSI disk, since the user would be selecting disks from a pick list.
If properly managed, we could manage to completely hide block device names from the user altogether, and let it be all managed from a user-mode daemon. This would obviously be a lot of work, but I fancy the end result would be really cool. :-)
- Ted
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