Re: SCSI disk devices

Stephen Williams (steve@icarus.icarus.com)
Wed, 07 May 1997 09:34:17 -0700


tytso@MIT.EDU said:
> I had always thought that the right approach would go far beyond
> scsidev; if you have a volume management daemon that would
> automatically do the right thing based on the volume ID (pretty much
> all filesystems have them now: ext2, iso9660, even MS-DOS FAT), then
> who cares what the device name is?

Yikes! Flashbacks of solaris are coming to haunt me.

I personally think that the simpls SVR3 scheme of naming scsi devices by
controller, target, unit, slice (cXtYuZsN) is plenty sufficient for most
interesting cases. Except for the slice, most everything can be seen on
the physical device, and target 4 has the same name no matter what's
around it on the chain.

I would leave the removable media-volume lables-moving things around
problem to something like amd. In fact, maybe amd can do that already?
Other then "media changed" signals, I think the kernel has no business
worrying about this.

In any case, I think the kernel only needs some kind of better scsi device
naming. More abstract volume management is best left to application code,
which can anyhow do much more interesting GUI stuff and would be a better
sell and an oportunity for an enterprising small company.

-- 
Steve Williams
steve@icarus.com
steve@picturel.com

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And lines to code before I sleep, And lines to code before I sleep."