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SubjectRe: Devices...
On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Robert Dinse wrote:

> Something I positively hate about Linux now is the way it dynamically
> assigns drives to device names when you boot. So I have for example,
> controller 0 with drives on ID 1, 3, and 5, and it maps them to /dev/sda,
> /dev/sdb, and /dev/sdc, then I add a device on ID 2, and it changes the mapping
> for the last two drives, or remove a device, etc. This is really a PITA.

right, aside hating the instability of Solaris I like their style of
assigning SCSI device names (aka major.minor numbers). The devfs should
support both styles (old Linux style for compatibility and Solaris style
for admins sake) - best if they would be a kernel-option. Even better if
we had SCSI (card) drivers which get an option like "I am card number XX"
so that an additional card or altered order on PCI bus doesn't change the
order of the device names (Yet this is possible only with modules, but
annoying if you have to boot the SCSI disks).

> Another concern I would have with devfs is the ability for permissions on
> a device to persist across boots. Chances are good that I don't want the
> permissions on a device to be the defaults. So then I have to add yet another
> script to run at boot time to change all of the device permissions which slows
> the boot process.

It slows the process by one or two seconds - I think this doesn't matter
on Linux which needs two minutes on my box (_many_ daemons) and runs for
some days or weeks (before I either crash it with alphaware or try a new
kernel).

But at least human beeings tend to forget which settings they made before
writing a boot script - so I would like a mount option like
"permfile=/devfsperms" which is updated by the devfs driver on any changed
permission and reread on mount action. Best if it were ASCII.

By the way: if you only want to grant some rights to users: create a
device file somewhere else (like /devusr). If you want to revoke it: see
the draft above.

Konrad


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