Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 25 Dec 2000 02:32:58 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 25 Dec 2000 02:32:48 -0500 Received: from cx518206-b.irvn1.occa.home.com ([24.21.107.123]:1040 "EHLO cx518206-b.irvn1.occa.home.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 25 Dec 2000 02:32:41 -0500 From: "Barry K. Nathan" Message-Id: <200012250702.XAA01122@cx518206-b.irvn1.occa.home.com> Subject: Re: Proposal: devfs names ending in %d or %u To: radoni@crosswinds.net Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 23:02:39 -0800 (PST) Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Reply-To: barryn@pobox.com In-Reply-To: from "Eric Shattow" at Dec 24, 2000 11:46:02 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Eric Shattow wrote: [snip] > when i insert a FAT formatted disc with a PC partition table, the partition > i want to mount is part1. when i insert a HFS formatted disc with a MAC > partition table, the partition i want to mount is part4. this is very ugly, and it has nothing to do with devfs. Those would be /dev/sda1 (adjust device name for IDE instead of SCSI, etc.) and /dev/sda4 without devfs. In this case, the problem is that different Zip disks really do have their data on different partitions. (If you use enough different disks and formatting utilities, it won't even be the same partition for all PC disks or all Mac disks, IIRC.) I don't use Zip disks much anymore, although there's a similar phenomenon with my SCSI MO drive on my desktop Mac (which I recently started using Linux on again). What would be nice is if there were a way of saying, "here's the disk, mount the Right Partition(tm) in /mnt/whatever." For all I know, maybe someone's done that already. If not, it seems to me that a userspace utility (== no extra kernel bloat) could parse the partition table and use some heuristics or something to pick the partition to mount. (I'm probably going to do other stuff instead of implementing this, but I haven't decided for sure yet.) In any case, I think the solution would be completely orthogonal to devfs... -Barry K. Nathan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/