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

Jens Axboe
2011-11-09T18:54:34Z

On 2011-11-09 17:25, 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

Ack on this, it seems both unneeded, unused, and a bad hack. We need to
revert it before 3.2 rolls out, otherwise we are stuck with it.

--
Jens Axboe