On Sat, 2004-11-06 at 17:16 -0500, Alan Stern wrote: > On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > > > Ok. On a totally separate issue, aren't there some kind of unique IDs or > > serial number on mass storage to avoid just that ? I know ieee1394 does, > > though I don't think linux can deal with that properly (MacOS can > > afaik). > > Sometimes there are, and the 2.4 version of usb-storage attempts to use > them to keep track of devices when they are disconnected and reconnected. > During the 2.5 development cycle Linus came down hard and said this was > absolutely the wrong thing to do. Ever since then usb-storage ignores > UIDs and serial numbers. Of course, the higher layers are still free to > use things like filesystem labels... But that means unmounting/remounting... and possible data loss ... I think MacOS can shout at you when you disconnect a mounted device and lets you put it back without data loss, but then, that was old MacOS, I don't know if OSX can do the same. Anyway, this is unrelated and won't change anytime soon. Ben.
