Re: [RFC PATCH] Multi-threaded device probing

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 05:29:48AM -0600, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 12:31:32AM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > I don't know enough about SCSI to say if this driver core patch will
> > help them out or not.  At first glance it does, but the device order
> > gets all messed up from what users are traditionally used to, so perhaps
> > the scsi core will just have to stick with their own changes.
> 
> Right.  Networking is in the same boat ... unless they're using udev
> or some other tool which renames network interfaces.  I'm not entirely
> comfortable with the kernel forcing you to use some other tool in order
> to maintain stable device names on a static setup.

I agree.

However, almost all distros now use persistant names for network devices
due to the PCI Hotplug issue, so it isn't probably as bad as you might
think.

> Perhaps we need either a CONFIG option or a boot option to decide
> whether to do parallel pci probes.

Oh yeah, it will be probably both of them :)

> I still think we need a method of renaming block devices, but haven't
> looked into it in enough detail yet.

That could get "interesting"...

But now that we all are using /dev/disk/ and it has persistant device
names for block devices, I really don't think it's that big of a deal.

thanks,

greg k-h