On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:28:15 -0600 James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 11:07 -0800, Kristen Carlson Accardi wrote: > > I understand what you are trying to do - I guess I just doubt the > > value you've added by doing this. I think that there's going to be > > so much customization that system vendors will want to add, that > > they are going to wind up adding a custom library regardless, so > > standardising those few things won't buy us anything. > > It depends ... if you actually have a use for the customisations, yes. > If you just want the basics of who (what's in the enclousure), what > (activity) and where (locate) then I think it solves your problem > almost entirely. > > So, entirely as a straw horse, tell me what else your enclosures > provide that I haven't listed in the four points. The SES standards > too provide a huge range of things that no-one ever seems to > implement (temperature, power, fan speeds etc). > > I think the users of enclosures fall int these categories > > 85% just want to know where their device actually is (i.e. that sdc is > in enclosure slot 5) > 50% like watching the activity lights > 30% want to be able to have a visual locate function > 20% want a visual failure indication (the other 80% rely on some OS > notification instead) > > When you add up the overlapping needs, you get about 90% of people > happy with the basics that the enclosure services provide. Could > there be more ... sure; should there be more ... I don't think so ... > that's what value add the user libraries can provide. > > James > > I don't think I'm arguing whether or not your solution may work, what I am arguing is really a more philosophical point. Not "can we do it this way", but "should we do it way". I am of the opinion that management belongs in userspace. I also am of the opinion that if you can successfully accomplish something in user space, you should. I also believe that even if you provide this basic interface, all system vendors are going to provide libraries on top of that to customize it, so you've not added much value to just a simple message passing interface. So, I'm happy to defer to Jeff's judgement call here - I just want to do what's right for our customers and get an enclosure management interface for SATA exposed, preferrably in time for the 2.6.26 merge window. If he prefers your design, I'll disagree, but commit to his decision and try to get this to work for SATA. If he'd rather see something along the lines of what I proposed, then since it is 100% self contained in the SATA subsystem, it shouldn't impact whatever you want to do in the SCSI subsystem. Jeff? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
