Re: [PATCH] 2.5.14 IDE 56

Linus Torvalds
2002-05-07T18:46:48Z

On Tue, 7 May 2002, Richard Gooch wrote:
> > Which may certainly be acceptable, of course.
>
> I wasn't suggesting a magic readlink(2). I was suggesting a *real*
> one. Device nodes get stored in the physical tree (what you call
> driverfs), and the entries in the logical tree are symlinks.

NO.

This is one backwards compatibility thing that I'm _not_ removing.

We have tons of existign /dev trees, and I'm not making them into
symlinks.

Also, you obviously haven't thought it through AT ALL. Hint: partitions.

If you have /dev/hda1, that _cannot_ be a symlink to the physical tree,
because on a physical level that partition DOES NOT EXIST. It's purely a
virtual mapping.

Yet clearly there _is_ a mapping from /dev/hda1 onto the physical device
in question, and clearly it _is_ a meaninful operation to operate on the
physical device underlying /dev/hda1.

So if you want to have a sane interface, you need to have a way to look up
the physical device that underlies /dev/hda1.

Yet it clearly cannot be a symlink.

QED.

So stop mixing up physical devices and /dev. They should NOT be handled by
the same mechanism.

Linus