Re: [patch] IDE driver model update

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

Hi!

> > > > _ALL_ buses that have driverfs support (IDE, SCSI, USB, PCI) have their
> > > > own rules for lifetimes of their structures.  And that's not likely to
> > > > change - these objects belong to drivers and in some cases (IDE) are
> > > > not even allocated dynamically - they are reused if nothing is holding
> > > > them.
> > > 
> > > IDE objects can also outlast the hardware - consider an active mount on
> > > an ejected pcmcia card. Right now we don't do the right stuff to
> > > reconnect that on re-insert but one day we may need to. As it is we keep
> > > the instance around to avoid crashes
> > 
> > Ouch.  That (reconnects) may require interesting things from queue-related
> > code.  What behaviour do you want while card is disconnected?  All requests
> > getting errors / all requests getting blocked / reads failing, writes blocking?
> 
> This raises the interesting possibility of being able to refer to
> things like removable media directly, instead of the device the media
> is inserted in.
> 
> The Amiga was doing this years ago.  You could access floppy drives
> as, E.G. df0:, df1:, etc, but if you formatted a volume and called it
> foobar, you could access foobar: no matter which floppy drive you put
> it in to.
> 
> Also, Plan 9 does similar interesting things - you can do the equivilent of:
> 
> ls /internet/websites/kernel.org/
> 
> and treat the website as a filesystem.

uservfs.sf.net, and you can do similar stuff on linux.
									Pavel
-- 
I'm pavel@ucw.cz. "In my country we have almost anarchy and I don't care."
Panos Katsaloulis describing me w.r.t. patents at discuss@linmodems.org