Re: [PATCH] 2.5.14 IDE 56

Jauder Ho
2002-05-07T17:27:20Z

Ben, what you are proposing is fairly similar to what Solaris does today.
There is a /devices directory that contains the real path while /dev
contains the legacy stuff. Seems to work fine and given the proper docs,
you can decipher what the /devices path points to fairly easily. So I
certainly wouldnt mind seeing this happen for Linux eventually.

--Jauder

On Tue, 7 May 2002 benh@kernel.crashing.org wrote:

> > /driverfs/root/pci0/00:1f.4/usb_bus/000/
> >
> >and it wouldn't be impossible (or even necessarily very hard) to make an
> >IDE controller export the "IDE device tree" the same way a USB controller
> >now exports the "USB device tree".
> >
> >For things like hotplug etc, I think driverfs is eventually the only way
> >to go, simply because it gives you the full (and unambiguous) path to
> >_any_ device, and is completely bus-agnostic.
> >
> >But there is definitely a potential backwards-compatibility-issue.
>
> One interesting thing here would be to have some optional link between
> the bus-oriented device tree and the function-oriented tree (ie. devfs
> or simply /dev). For example, an IDE node in driverfs could eventually
> hold symlinks to the entries it provides in /dev when using devfs (or
> just provide major/minor when not using devfs).
>
> What do you think ?
>
> One problem I've been faced with on ppc is to be able to match
> a linux device with what the firmware (Open Firmware) thinks that
> device is. The firmware view is bus-centered and it would be pretty
> easy to provide some additional entries in driverfs that give the
> OF fullpath of a given device. But then, the link between the actual
> driver in driverfs and the "device" as used by, for example, the
> filesystem isn't trivial.
>
> Ben.
>
>
>
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