[Novalug] Device naming.

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Sun Mar 14 16:22:13 EDT 2010


I agree, device names are basicly unpredictable. In fact, even Fixed 
Device names are at risk. The recent usurping of the HD (IDE) disks into 
the SD (SCSI) driver can cause some pains.

For example, I have a computer with one PATA and one SATA disk. Older 
systems call these HDA and SDA, and GRUB sees these as (hd0) and (hd1) 
respectively. But one of my newer systems looks for the SATA drive 
first, and calls SDB and SDA, rather than SDA and SDB.

And while I mount my disks by LABEL= (I think UUID= is fugly), what was 
previously HDA/(hd0) is now SDB/(hd1). Yeah, I could throw two map 
commands into grub, but I'd rather not.

As for Peter's suggestion about udev, I would argue violently with the 
word "clearly". Between HAL, UDEV, SYSFS, DEVFS, KUDZU et al (some of 
these are obsolete), it's almost impossible to tell what is going on 
anymore.

Yeah, I know there are Too Many Devices, but how about dividing the 
space into Important Devices That Most People Have and bless thoss names 
and number assignments Forever, and Weird Stuff That We Support So We 
Can Claim We Can Run Anything and Everything and let THAT stuff be 
assigned dynamically?

Make the Commonplace Easy, and the Random/Weird/Obscure stuff Hard.

JIM

Peter Larsen wrote:
> 
> You should go read some of ALL the wonderful documentation on udev, 
> fuse, dm etc. which >>>clearly<<< documents how/why things have changed since 
> the 80's and 90's.



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