[6067] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: SCSI generic interface addition
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Youngdale)
Thu Mar 11 04:19:01 1999
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 22:11:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Eric Youngdale <eric@andante.jic.com>
To: Douglas Gilbert <dgilbert@interlog.com>
Cc: Bernard Hatt <bmh@arkady.demon.co.uk>,
linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <36E70FFD.692E4519@interlog.com>
On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Douglas Gilbert wrote:
> Bernard Hatt wrote:
> >
> > Because the /dev/sg? interfaces are assigned dynamically when
> > booting, my CD writer device name changes depending on whether
> > my scanner is attached or switched on.
>
> Yep, it's a damn nuisance. It is even worse if it's a disk with
> your root partition that's being moved around. [Once I had my
> BIOS scanning one way trying to get track 0 (boot track) from
> one disk and Linux scanning another way and looking for the
> root partition on another disk.]
Hmm, I was hoping that someone would have come up with a brilliant
solution to this problem long long ago. I am certain that I am not
alone in this.
> > Having looked at the problem, I have hacked drivers/scsi/sg.c to
> > create directories under /proc/sg which contains symbolic links
> > named by the SCSI address or device name to the matching /dev/sg?
> > device file.
I haven't actually looked at what you did, so forgive me if you
have addressed this. What happens if you have more than one SCSI bus,
and each bus has a device number 0?
> Well there is this really persistent guy from down under called
> Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au) who has been pushing the
> idea of a pseudo-file system for devices called devfs. The web page
> is: http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~rgooch/linux/kernel-patches.html
> One day Linus is going to relent and put it in cause he has
> been thinking about it for a loooong time.
My main objection to this was that it never seemed obvious that
this is something that really had to be in the kernel. There has got to
be a user-space solution to this issue that wouldn't bloat the kernel.
FWIW, I had my own user space solution that would populate a
/dev/scsi directory with symlinks or device nodes. This was just a
program that would run at bootup that would fill the directory. It even
had the ability to have user specified aliases so that a cdwriter would
always appear as /dev/scsi/cdwriter. There weren't any real technical
problems with it - the only problem was that wew people really seemed
interested. Thus it hasn't really been maintained, although it probably
still works.
-Eric
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