udev & kernel names

[Nishanth Aravamudan <nacc@us.ibm.com>]

Greg, udev Developers,

One of the most valuable features of new udev-based system is persistent
device naming. This is especially useful for large systems, which may
involve upwards of 4000 disks. Rather than determining which disk is
sdzz, the administrator can name it tray15_disk7 and thus easily access
the drive. We all know this much, though.

Another interesting idea would be to somehow inform the kernel of these
new names (sysfs?). The gist being that currently, even though udev has
created a new dev node for the device, the kernel is unaware of this
``name'' when reporting errors. I think it could be very useful for our
friendly sysadmin to see ``tray15_disk7 has failed'' rather than ``sdzz
has failed.'' Or perhaps they want to offline an entire tray; it would
be simpler in scripts to refer to ``tray15_*'' than the appropriate
kernel device nodes.

My questions are:

Is this feasible?
Would a new file per-device in sysfs be the appropriate place for this?
Is there a better way to go about getting these useful log messages?

If I need to clarify the problem/proposed solution further, please let
me know.

Please make sure to keep me CC'ed on replies, as I am not subscribed to
the hotplug list.

Thanks,
Nish


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