Re: SCSI disk devices
Terje Malmedal (terje.malmedal@usit.uio.no)
04 May 1997 13:05:57 +0200
Eric Youngdale <eric@andante.jic.com> writes:
> >Actually, I think this program *is* alpha status, it looks like it was
> >never properly cleaned up for release (often does not check returned
> >values etc.) but it *does* work and is very nice. If Eric is busy, better
> >release alpha than not at all...
>
> When I wrote scsidev, the idea was to toss it out and see
> whether people consider this to be an acceptable solution to the
> problem of addressing devices. As far as I can tell, most people were
> quite indifferent, and other people seemed to dislike the h#c#t#d#p#
> types of names.
>
> The real problem I guess is that people with many disks have
> much different needs than those with just one or two. As a result, people
> with just one don't want 'ugly' names, while people with very large numbers
> of disks find the '/dev/sda1' types of names to be useless.
>
> Let me pose the question again. For large numbers of disks (you get
> to define large), is scsidev an adequate solution to the problem or not?
> Keep in mind that it doesn't force people to abandon the /dev/sda1 types
> of names, so people with small numbers of disks can continue to operate as
> they always have.
>
> If I get a clear indication that this is the direction we want
> to go, then scsidev can be cleaned up and enhanced (making it volume
> label aware is one enhancement I wanted to add, especially now that
> ext2 supports volume labels). It also should be made filesystem aware
> too, I think so that it can recognize various types of filesystems
> (this is a prerequisite to being able to snarf the volume labels).
The naming scheme is very useful, but I would much prefer a kernel
version so that I don't have to fix the kernel every time I add or
remove a disk. I am running Linux on an IBM PowerPC where the internal
disk is at id 6.
Volume labels would be even better, AIX already has that
functionality, if I move a disk to another controller/id the AIX
kernel will find it automatically. This can even be done without
rebooting(Haven't tried with a mounted filesystem though).
BTW. Linux for ppc uses an unsigned char so this code does not work:
char c;
...
while ((c = getopt(argc, argv, "flvsm:")) != EOF)
...
c needs to be an int instead. This is a problem in scsidev and
scsiinfo, apart from that both programs work very nicely on my
machine.
--
- Terje
malmedal@usit.uio.no