Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 15 May 2001 15:21:28 -0700 | From | David Brownell <> | Subject | Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants |
| |
> And my opinion is that the "hot-plugged" approach works for devices even > if they are soldered down ...
Yep. Though I tend to look at the whole problem as "autoconfiguration" lately. Solving device naming (even the major/minor subproblem) is only one part of having a complete autoconfiguration infrastructure.
> Now, if we just fundamentally try to think about any device as being > hot-pluggable, you realize that things like "which PCI slot is this device > in" are completely _worthless_ as device identification, because they > fundamentally take the wrong approach, and they don't fit the generic > approach at all.
Well, "completely" goes too far IMO. Unless by "identifier" you imply something of which there's only one? In my book, devices can have many kinds of identifiers.
The reason is that such "physical" identifiers (or "device topology" IDs) may be all that's available to distinguish some devices. For example, network adapters (no major/minor numbers :) and parallel/printer/serial ports may have no better "stable" (over reboots) identifier available.
Without "stable" names, it's too easy to have bad things happen, like your "confidential materials" printer output get redirected into the lobby printer, or trust your network DMZ as if it were the internal network. Given hotplugging, I think the best solution to such issues does involve exposing topological IDs such as PCI slot names. (What IDs the different applications use is a different issue.)
- Dave
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |