Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 15:55:22 +0000 From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com> Cc: gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu, pjd@freebsd.org, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Accessing disks via their serial numbers. Message-ID: <52322.1151337322@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:32:40 CST." <20060626.093240.-432837692.imp@bsdimp.com>
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In message <20060626.093240.-432837692.imp@bsdimp.com>, "M. Warner Losh" writes : >: I suspect that the proponents of this scheme will object to my proposal >: because they can not do a "ls /dev/mumble/*" to get a list of disk >: serial numbers[...] > >I'm curious... what's wrong with adding additional things to the /dev >directory? One of the biggest annoyances I have in troubleshooting is >not being able to see what files are there and having magic file names >that one can open but not list. devfs is not a hardware inventory facility, it is magic place for performing a rendez-vous with a device driver. We really do not want to prepopulate /dev with all possible devices, that model broke down in the late 1980ies and it has not become more feasible in the meantime. The reason people have trouble understanding this very basic point is that UCB strayed from the UNIX philosophy when they added all the socket system calls instead of adding the /net filesystem. If we had /net, everybody would be able to see that non-storage filesystems should not be prepopulated with every conceiveable vnode. The automounter is another good example: here quite complex software was written specifically to avoid prepopulation with all conceiveable vnodes and mountpoints, that that is even for storage filesystems. Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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