Re: devfs support in ofpath: criteria for patches

[Michael Shuey <shuey@ecn.purdue.edu>]

> > > But how long will that last.  What I want to know is, what question
> > > was devfs an answer to?  There must have been one, right?  Is it a
> 
> > devfs is a solution in search of a problem.
> 
> that's what I thought.

devfs is _great_.  Solaris has had this sort of thing (albeit with shorter
to type names) for about a decade; it's about time Linux got something like
it.  devfs gives absolute names based on device locations.  While average
users aren't likely to see much benefit, people with truckloads of swappable
disks, CDs, etc. need something like this to avoid having to constantly
edit /etc/fstab between boots.  With devfs I can finally add a SCSI target
in the middle of my chain and not have half my disks change their device
names.

Now if network devices would adopt something similar, life would be
beautiful.  On a machine with > 8 NICs of various types figuring out
which one probed to eth4 can be a problem, especially if some of 'em
are hot-swappable and not always present...

-- 
Mike Shuey