From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Stefan Richter Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:32:58 +0000 Subject: Re: udev rules for new firewire driver stack Message-Id: <48ADB4DA.2000509@s5r6.in-berlin.de> List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org David Moore wrote: > On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 21:39 +0200, Stefan Richter wrote: >> 3.e) Aliases for firewire character devices (symlinks) ... >> I spotted the following in udev/rules/redhat/40-redhat.rules: >> >> KERNEL="fw*", PROGRAM="fw_unit_symlinks.sh %k %n", SYMLINK+="$result" ... >> this will create symlinks like iidc3, sbp2-7, avc5 end the likes. >> These aren't persistent (only unique), because %n will change all the >> time. Since they provide symlinks which encode the types of available >> units on the node, these symlinks may be of (some limited) use in the >> future, provided that they would be available on all distributions. > >> So, all things considered, I think we don't need any of such symlinks at >> all. >> > > Yes, I think it was me who originally came up with this symlink script. > See here: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id$0770 > > It was created because udev rules could not see the spec_id of the > devices and we wanted to selectively chgrp iidc and avc devices to the > console owner. Thus, this script would create named symlinks and then > udev could simply chgrp based on the filename. > > Now that ACLs are used in Fedora for dealing with console ownership, > this script and its udev rule are probably not very useful to anyone. So, to summarize the need of symlink rules: - We don't need symlinks (aliases) for application support, neither type-oriented aliases, nor persistently named aliases. - Symlinks may be needed to fit the firewire device files into a distro's file permissions scheme though. (This was actually the intent behind redhat/40-redhat.rules, which wasn't apparent to me when I read the rules files out of context.) Ergo, there may be distro-specific symlinks but applications/libraries will not rely on any of those. (Right?) -- Stefan Richter -===-=--- =--- =-=-http://arcgraph.de/sr/