Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: linux-kernel-digest V1 #1491 | Date | Fri, 16 Jan 1998 18:18:11 -0500 | From | John Gotts <> |
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In message <Pine.LNX.3.95.980116153350.335A-100000@wc-rt.tntech.edu>, "Elijah L . Wright" writes:
>Heh. Back in the days before the earth cooled, Slackware used the >following hard drive devnames:
>current: old slackware way: >/dev/hda /dev/hda >/dev/hdb /dev/hdb >/dev/hdc /dev/hd1a >/dev/hdd /dev/hd1b
>Now, don't we want to avoid this kind of foolishness? Nothing against >slackware, and i realize that you can call the nodes whatever the heck you >want, but this was STUPID. :) I personally hate the Slowaris method of >naming disks. It is painful on the eyes, and i just make symlinks to the >nice linux names instead. :)
That's not accurate.
Way back in 1994, Delman Lee <delman@mipg.upenn.edu> wrote kernel patches to support more than two non-SCSI hard drives. Being able to use these patches required either an exacto knife (*) or (if you were lucky enough to find one) a controller that had a jumper for an alternate IRQ. Delman selected the afore- mentioned device naming scheme completely independently of the most popular Linux distribution at that time, Slackware.
Since then, Mark Lord and others have completely revamped the MFM/RLL/IDE driver to support multiple IRQ's, shared IRQ's, multiple controllers, at least 8 devices, and many more features too numerous to mention here. Along the way, Mark changed the device naming scheme to what it is today.
These days every motherboard has built-in support for 4 IDE devices of any type, but not too long ago most folks plunked down $25-$50 to buy a multi-io card that only supported two IDE hard drives. And impoverished students like myself ran Linux on second-hand RLL drives...
(*) I still have a ruined RLL controller to show for it. ;-)
-- John GOTTS <jgotts@engin.umich.edu> http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~jgotts
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