From owner-freebsd-arch Tue Jul 25 12:51:28 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from feral.com (feral.com [192.67.166.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3007437B86E for ; Tue, 25 Jul 2000 12:51:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mjacob@feral.com) Received: from beppo.feral.com (beppo [192.67.166.79]) by feral.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA30744; Tue, 25 Jul 2000 12:50:59 -0700 Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 12:51:01 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Jacob Reply-To: mjacob@feral.com To: Poul-Henning Kamp Cc: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How much do we need the all-singing, all-dancing devfs? In-Reply-To: <13763.964554142@critter.freebsd.dk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > In my mind it would make more sense to make an API to examine the > disklabels (of various sorts) and pick the "FreeBSD device identifier" > from there. > > That way all devices, SCSI, ATA, IDE, RAID, Flash and so on can be > handled. For devices that have been so labelled, yes, and that the label in question can be written to the device media (or stored in the device). This means that you have an import step. Not the worst thing in the world, but it does indeed restrict usage and sharing on a SAN- you can't rewrite the 50 NT volume labels on the SAN to find a FreeBSD identifier. And ocmpanies won't use FreeBSD if that is what we will require (this, I in fact, *do* know from stuff at Veritas- ask me some time what hacks that have to happen to make sure, when exporting volumes in target mode, you have to take to make sure that NT doesn't emit it's love label all over your FreeBSD volumes!). As I've said- I would like to have what you propose available. I would prefer it. But I also would like to solve directly addressing via immutable hardware properties (which vary as to type from device to device) direct access to some devices. -matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message