Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Tue, 15 May 2001 11:15:41 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants |
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On Tue, 15 May 2001, Jeff Garzik wrote: > > > 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. > > Should I interpret this as you disagreeing with > exporting-bus-info-to-userspace type additions? ie. some random > get-info ioctl spits out pci_dev->slot_name to userspace.
Yes and no.
I'm absolutely _not_ against exporting information. That kind of information can be very useful to help the user diagnose things, by visualizing device layout etc (ie think here of a "device manager" application that does all the pretty graphics that people so enjoy).
Giving that kind of information to the user can be very useful indeed. And I have no arguments against it.
The part I absolutely detest is when the information becomes more than just "information", and is used to enforce a world-view. Anybody who uses physical location for naming devices (ie you have to know where the hell the thing is in order to look it up), is so far out to lunch that it's not even funny. And the sad fact is that this is pretty much how ALL unixes have historically done things ("Oh, you want to see the disk? Sure. It's on scsi bus 1, channel 2, ID 3, lun 0, so you just open /dev/s1c3l0 and you're done! Easy as pie!").
Keep it informational. And NEVER EVER make it part of the design.
That way, people who grew up with big unix machines can have their scripts that creates the stupid names dynamically on the fly, and still play at being bound to a static naming scheme that was silly 20 years ago and is just incredibly stupid today. There's a script for doing exactly this for SCSI. I forget what it's called, because I obviously think the thing is stupid, but giving people the power to do even silly things is what Linux is all about.
Linus
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