On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 11:50:54AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote: > > And again, why not just fix the userspace tools? That is trivial to do > > so and again, could have been done by now in the years this has been > > discussed. > > So I can summarise where I think we are in these discussions: > > We provide the ability to give all kernel devices a "preferred name". > By default this will be the device name the kernel would have originally > assigned. the dev_printk's will use the preferred name, and it will be > modifiable from user space. All the kernel will do is print out > whatever it is ... no guarantees of uniqueness or specific format will > be made. Since we're only providing one preferred_name file, the kernel > can only have one preferred name for a device at any given time > (although it is modifiable on the fly as many times as the user > chooses). > > The design is to use this preferred name to implement what Hitachi wants > in terms of persistent name, but we don't really care. > > All userspace naming will be taken care of by the usual udev rules, so > for disks, something like /dev/disk/by-preferred/<fred> which would be > the usual symbolic link. No, udev can not create such a link after the preferred name is set, as it has no way of knowing that the name was set. > This will ensure that kernel output and udev input are consistent. It > will still require that user space utilities which derive a name for a > device will need modifying to print out the preferred name. It also doesn't solve the issue of userspace wanting to use such a "preferred" name in the command line of tools, as there will not be a link back to the "kernel" name directly in /dev/. So as userspace tools will still need to be fixed, I don't see how adding a kernel file for this is going to help any. Well, a bit in that the kernel log files will look "different", but again, that really isn't a problem that userspace couldn't also solve with no kernel changes needed. thanks, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
