From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751695AbWGZQmh (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:42:37 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751690AbWGZQmh (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:42:37 -0400 Received: from palinux.external.hp.com ([192.25.206.14]:37834 "EHLO palinux.external.hp.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751695AbWGZQmg (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:42:36 -0400 Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 10:42:36 -0600 From: Matthew Wilcox To: Greg KH Cc: Greg KH , Stefan Richter , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] Multi-threaded device probing Message-ID: <20060726164235.GH22822@parisc-linux.org> References: <20060725203028.GA1270@kroah.com> <44C6B881.7030901@s5r6.in-berlin.de> <20060726073132.GE6249@suse.de> <20060726112948.GA13490@parisc-linux.org> <20060726161647.GA9675@kroah.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20060726161647.GA9675@kroah.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11+cvs20060403 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 09:16:47AM -0700, Greg KH wrote: > 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. Oh, for people using a distro, I'm sure it's no problem at all. It's the homebrew people I'm worried about ;-) > > 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. Actually, that's exactly why it's a big deal. The kernel spits out messages like: printk(KERN_DEBUG "%s: Mode Sense: %02x %02x %02x %02x\n", diskname, buffer[0], buffer[1], buffer[2], buffer[3]); where diskname is something like sda. Now the user has to figure out what sda means in terms of /dev/disk/ and in terms of scsi h:c:t:l and in terms of which sticky label is on which drive. If we let userspace change the gendev's disk_name, that printk can be meaningful to the user in at least one of those senses.