Messages in this thread | | | From | (david parsons) | Subject | Re: devfs again, (was RE: USB device allocation) | Date | 12 Oct 1999 12:34:48 -0700 |
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In article <linux.kernel.199910100218.WAA25154@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl>, Horst von Brand <vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl> wrote: >Dan Hollis <goemon@sasami.anime.net> said: >> On Fri, 8 Oct 1999, Horst von Brand wrote: >> > Not my point, I was saying that I must now _also_ take care of not >> > hijacking a name. But you don't have to mess with names if you don't use >> > devfs. What if I decide to set up a full chinese version of Linux, with >> > chinese device names? Now I can't even begin of thinking in using the stock >> > kernel... > >> Which chinese version of Linux uses chinese device names? AFAIK most >> (all?) distributions use the "standard" names, which is basically the same >> as if it had been kernel policy anyway. Change device names at your own >> peril -- many programs are hardcoded to fixed device names. (The kernel, >> and init come to mind). > >None ATM. And device names hardcoded into the kernel is BAD, everyone >agrees on that.
Except for, apparently, the people who write kernel code:
(edited dmesg output) . hda: HITACHI CDR-8130, ATAPI CDROM drive . SCSI device sda: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 8925000 [4357 MB] [4.4 GB] SCSI device sdb: hdwr sector= 512 bytes. Sectors= 8467200 [4134 MB] [4.1 GB] . Partition check: sda: sda1 sda2 sdb: sdb1 sdb2 . lp1 at 0x0378, (polling) . tty00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A tty01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A tty03 at 0x02e8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A . eth0: DEC 21040 Tulip at 0xdc00, 00 80 c6 03 6e 9b, IRQ 10 .
If my scsi disks are /dev/scsi/disk/0, /dev/scsi/disk/1, /dev/scsi/disk/2, I'll still need to do mapping between this kernel-provided namespace and my namespace to make sense of the kernel messages. If, as there is when I'm running a 2.3.x kernel, a devfs present, the existance of this namespace would does not invalidate my custom namespace, except that I can then do similarly to what Solaris and Irix do and convert /dev/scsi/disk/0 into a symlink to /hw/sda
To do any sort of device notifier, whether it be devfs or the unworkable devd kludge, there needs to be a kernel namespace. We already have two of them (the human-readable names listed above and the major/minor black magic that's the traditional Unix approach), so the badness of them is not a given.
____ david parsons \bi/ without a namespace, it's really hard to talk to \/ anything.
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