[dm-devel] [PATCH] [RFC] persistent readable names

[Patrick Caulfield]

This patch is more for discussion than inclusion at the moment. Basically it's
unrealistic for users with hundreds of disks to alias them all in
/etc/multipath.conf and the default names are very unwieldy.

What this patch does is attach a name to any un-aliased path and write that name
to /etc/multipath.names. The file is read again every time the paths are added
so they are persistent.

There are a small number of possibly contentious things:
- the multipath.names file is in a different format from the config file. It's
easier to parse this one and it's not meant to be human editable really. Also
extending the existing parser to cope with the ability to read bits for the same
MPE from more than one place looked hard :)

- The names file is held in /etc which may not be available if multipath is run
from an initrd - though it does fail silently if it can't be written.

The feature is selected with

defaults {
   autonames 1
}

in the config file, and the names can be formatted with

defaults {
   autoname_prefix "multipath%d"
}
-- 

patrick
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: mpauto.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 6778 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/attachments/20051005/f2c1fb86/attachment.bin>