Re: removable media revalidation - udev vs. devfs or static /dev

Linus Torvalds
2004-01-08T04:24:44Z

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Gene Heskett wrote:
>
> I do too, except the card is still in my camera when I do it.

My camera just does USB-1, and with a gigabyte card that's just too
painful. Besides, I don't want to eat camera batteries. So I just pop it
over in something that is ten times faster.

> But, I do have to ask, why the ro?

I don't trust camera firmware to do a full VFAT implementation, so out of
principle I only let the camera write to it normally. That way I don't
need to worry about the limited braincapacity of my poor camera.

> Apparently fat thinks an empty sector is the end of the directory. So
> one must delete on LIFO basis.

Sounds like your camera gets easily confused too. Me, I just transfer the
whole thing, and then I let the camera do a "format".

I've seen cameras that have serious problems with old filesystems - when
they get fragmented enough, the camera says that there is 50% free space,
but can't actually write a single picture any more. Deleting pictures to
make space only helps a bit, then it's "full" again.

Which is why I just delete everything by letting the camera do the
formatting.

Some day cameras will run Linux too, and I'll trust them. In the meantime
I just don't expect them to do that well.

Linus