From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Brownell Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2001 01:33:21 +0000 Subject: Re: Adding PCMCIA support to the kernel tree -- developers needed. Message-Id: 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 > From: "Andrew Morton" > > Device naming worries me. Usually a smart thing to do when designing anything, even if you're not in marketing! :-) > Suppose we were able to make an entire "hotplug" transaction > synchronous and correctly serialised. So when I "insert" my > 3c501, the driver load and the open all happen safely and > serially. > > Well, I still want to provide a consistent and predictable > ordering of this wrt the "hotplug" of my Acenic card. > > Why? Because I don't want them to be randomly assigned > "eth0" or "eth1" depending on which way the wind is > blowing. The word I use for that characteristic is a "stable" name. As in, "Device names visible outside the kernel should be stable, so you can label devices and use those names in shell scripts and sysadmin forms." Names based on physical connectivity (PCI slot, port on USB hub, etc) are stable almost by definition; they change only when you connect things differently. Some names are more stable than that ... unique serial numbers (like Ethernet addresses) can help. Names like "eth0" aren't stable, nor are /proc/bus/usb names, but /proc/bus/pci names are. If "acenic" used "pdev->slot_name" not "eth%d" for its interface names, that driver would have stable naming right now. I read recently that "stable" names were a goal of "devfs", so I wonder if that "stable" is my "stable". > This means, I think, that we want *global* serialisation > of all hotplug activity. .... No -- using "stable" names would solve that! Serialization between subsystems would be a bug in need of fixing. Serialization within individual subsystems is likely though. - Dave _______________________________________________ Linux-hotplug-devel mailing list http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net Linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-hotplug-devel