On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:58, Gabor Gombas <gombasg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 11:33:36AM +0100, Kay Sievers wrote: > >> Network devices have only one entry point, if you insist you can think >> of the index number as another value, but there is always only one >> single name that matters. > > And you have only one (major, minor) pair for block devices. No > difference. It's different. You can't have multiple names to access an interface, like you can have symlinks, that's all it is about. >> And we need to rename them because we have >> no real concept of symlinks for network interfaces. >> >> That is not true at all for block devices, you can identify them in >> many ways, by name, by physical location, by hardware ID from the >> stuff behind the devices, by filesystem metadata, by properies of the >> specific subsystem, > > And you can identify network devices by name, physical location, > hardware address, stuff behind the devices (aka. network > autoconfiguration). Again no difference. Sure, you can, but there is nothing that gives you any name to access the device. All access needs to be manually translated to the real name before you interface with the kernel. It is very different. >> ... Renaming block devices just does not make much >> sense, because there is no primary name to use, it all depends on the >> actual setup and personal preference. > > Exactly. And that's why _I_ want to choose the name. The current > udev-based partial solution is not good enough, as even if I give a > meaningful name to a node in /dev the kernel still only tells me "there > is a bad sector on /dev/sdk" and I have to spend precious time to figure > out which device /dev/sdk is. OTOH if I could rename sdk to eg. > self1slot3 then the error message would contain _all_ the information I > need. If you care, log the symlinks to syslog, and you have always the relation of all created names to the device at any time the kernel device name existed. There is no point to open a can or worms, and debate over what primary names block devices should have, and how you handle conflicting names, duplicates like you have with multipath, race-free renaming, and so on. We have symlinks for that, which work good enough. Kay -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
