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Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 11:19:43 -0700
From: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
To: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Cc: Nao Nishijima <nao.nishijima.xt@hitachi.com>, linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org,
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        hare@suse.de, stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de, yrl.pp-manager.tt@hitachi.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] [RFC] genhd: add a new attribute in device structure
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On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 12:25:06PM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 09:14 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > > All userspace naming will be taken care of by the usual udev rules, so
> > > for disks, something like /dev/disk/by-preferred/<fred> which would be
> > > the usual symbolic link.
> > 
> > No, udev can not create such a link after the preferred name is set, as
> > it has no way of knowing that the name was set.
> 
> It can if we trigger a uevent.  Note: I'm not advocating this ... I'd be
> equally happy having whatever sets the kernel name create the link (or
> tickle udev to create it).  We definitely require device links, though,
> to get this to work.

And no, I don't want to trigger a uevent, Kay pointed out where this
will go very wrong very quickly if this is done.

> > > This will ensure that kernel output and udev input are consistent.  It
> > > will still require that user space utilities which derive a name for a
> > > device will need modifying to print out the preferred name.
> > 
> > It also doesn't solve the issue of userspace wanting to use such a
> > "preferred" name in the command line of tools, as there will not be a
> > link back to the "kernel" name directly in /dev/.
> 
> Right ... most tools use the name they're given (and all variants
> including the preferred one have links in /dev), which means they will
> show the preferred name by default (if they were given that name as
> input).  The only problem is tools that attempt to derive a device name,
> which is quite a small subset.

Douglas pointed out that those tools look in /dev/ which would not work
properly for this type of thing.

> > So as userspace tools will still need to be fixed, I don't see how
> > adding a kernel file for this is going to help any.  Well, a bit in that
> > the kernel log files will look "different", but again, that really isn't
> > a problem that userspace couldn't also solve with no kernel changes
> > needed.
> 
> This is true, but I think for the small effort it takes to implement the
> feature in-kernel compared with what we'd have to do to the
> distributions to get it implemented in userspace (we'd need klogd to do
> the conversion for dmesg ... I'm entirely unclear what we need to modify
> for /proc/partitions, etc.) the benefit outweighs the cost.
> 
> Additionally, since renaming is something users seem to want (just look
> at net interfaces), if we can make this work, we now have a definitive
> answer to point people at.

Renaming is something that we do NOT want to do, as we have learned our
lesson of the network device renaming mess.  And as Kay pointed out, we
already have an "alias" name there, which no one uses.

So again, I really don't like this, just fix the userspace tools to map
the proper device name that the kernel is using to the userspace name
the tool used, and all is fine.  This has been done already today,
succesfully, by many of the big "enterprise" monitoring systems that
work quite well on Linux, proving that this is not something that the
kernel needs to provide to implement properly.

thanks,

greg k-h
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