Re: [PATCH] block: Revert "[SCSI] genhd: add a new attribute "alias" in gendisk"

Greg KH
2011-11-09T16:53:30Z

On Wed, Nov 09, 2011 at 08:25:12AM -0800, Tejun Heo wrote:
> This reverts commit a72c5e5eb738033938ab30d6a634b74d1d060f10.
>
> The commit introduced alias for block devices which is intended to be
> used during logging although actual usage hasn't been committed yet.
> This approach adds very limited benefit (raw log might be easier to
> follow) which can be trivially implemented in userland but has a lot
> of problems.
>
> It is much worse than netif renames because it doesn't rename the
> actual device but just adds conveninence name which isn't used
> universally or enforced. Everything internal including device lookup
> and sysfs still uses the internal name and nothing prevents two
> devices from using conflicting alias - ie. sda can have sdb as its
> alias.
>
> This has been nacked by people working on device driver core, block
> layer and kernel-userland interface and shouldn't have been
> upstreamed. Revert it.
>
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1155104
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.scsi/68632
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.scsi/69776
>
> Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
> Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
> Cc: Nao Nishijima <nao.nishijima.xt@hitachi.com>
> Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

Thanks for reverting this,

greg k-h