Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 00:01:48 -0500 (EST)
From: Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org>
To: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
cc: Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>, Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>,
       Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>,
       Joerg Schilling <schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: CD writing in future Linux (stirring up a hornets' nest)
In-Reply-To: <20060210235654.GA22512@kroah.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0602122256130.6773@iabervon.org>
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On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Greg KH wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 04:06:39PM -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > 
> > The kernel could provide a list of devices by category. It doesn't have 
> > to name them, run scripts, give descriptions, or paint them blue. Just a 
> > list of all block devices, tapes, by major/minor and category (ie. 
> > block, optical, floppy) would give the application layer a chance to do 
> > it's own interpretation.
> 
> It does so today in sysfs, that is what it is there for.

sysfs doesn't do quite that level of categorization; if it did, cdrom_id 
would be unnecessary. It would be nice if you could do 
"grep 1 /sys/block/*/burns_cds" and get a list of all the block devices in 
your system that burn cds. (You can currently get a list of all of the 
removable block devices in your system, but not much else.)

The kernel must know a bunch of this sort of stuff, and it would be nice 
if the information available. (In fact, there's a lot that's in /proc/ide 
that isn't in /sys, which is a bit annoying, since it would be useful in 
/sys, especially if it would mean that you could ignore details of what 
kind of bus things were on.)

	-Daniel
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