Linux is not about choice [was Re: Fedora too cutting edge?]

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Fri Jan 11 22:15:42 UTC 2008


Arthur Pemberton wrote:

>>> On Jan 11, 2008 2:30 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> It doesn't seem as sensible as being able to plug into a known
>>>> controller position and get a known device name, particularly in the
>>>> scenario where the drives aren't hot-plug and you want to access a bunch
>>>> of new ones after a reboot and know which is which.
>>>
>>> Frankly i like this idea, but I'm unsure of the practicality of it:
>>>
>>> What is the highest level which is even aware of the physical location
>>> of said device? I would imagine the BIOS knows, and maybe some really
>>> low level kernel modules but anything above that?
>> The bios doesn't necessarily know anything except for the one(s) that it
>> might boot.  But I think there may be some extra magic in what the
>> kernel does with the names depending on which drive bios used to boot.
>> The stuff in /dev/disk/by-path might be useful for the versions that
>> have it, but I can't see anything for the empty controller positions
>> where the drives aren't connected so the arrangement doesn't make a lot
>> of sense.
> 
> 
> Then it seems to me that what you/i/we want can be accomplished with
> soem clever udev rules.

Yes, maybe, someday...  I'm just not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling 
that there will be a reasonable mechanism for people to interact with 
this process to get deterministic behavior for the simplest thing, 
accessing a device by a name related to the hardware in some way. 
Shouldn't that come before magically attempting some high-level thing 
with hot-plugged unknowns or browsing that only makes sense in a GUI?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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