User-friendly disk names [LWN.net]

User-friendly disk names

Posted Jun 23, 2011 12:01 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
In reply to: User-friendly disk names by NRArnot
Parent article: User-friendly disk names

>It was actually easier when disks were usually hdx and USB devices sdx!

Udev to the rescue, see /dev/disk/by-path! (Because that is what hdx reflected in a way.)

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User-friendly disk names

Posted Jun 23, 2011 23:43 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (2 responses)

But we're talking about kernel device names, not names of device special files. When the kernel warns about errors on a disk device, it identifies it by kernel device name and udev is irrelevant.

Except with at least some of these proposals, where udev could give the kernel a more meaningful name to use in communicating with the user.

The "sdaq" naming is really just a waste of a namespace. The kernel might as well talk to you in major/minor numbers.

User-friendly disk names

Posted Jun 30, 2011 8:32 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

But udev helps you to map sdX to real hardware:

# ls -lR /dev/disk/by-* | grep sdc1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 10 06-22 09:36 ata-ST3250820AS_6QE0XHAV-part1 -> ../../sdc1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 10 06-22 09:36 scsi-SATA_ST3250820AS_6QE0XHAV-part1 -> ../../sdc1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 10 06-22 09:36 pci-0000:00:1f.2-scsi-3:0:0:0-part1 -> ../../sdc1
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 10 06-22 09:36 4e11c761-2597-4b20-8e86-b9eac0a665d0 -> ../../sdc1

I'm sure there is some "udevadm info" invocation which will do the same and even provice more info.

User-friendly disk names

Posted Nov 13, 2011 14:26 UTC (Sun) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Yeah, but only if you *get* a /dev/sdx name. I'm playing with Open-iSCSI for the first time, on Suse, under Xen, and I can only get it to do that for the first two mounts; after /dev/sdb, I don't get a device anymore. I assume there's some knob I haven't found yet, but the doco on Open-I is kinda thin on the ground...

This planning treads much the same ground as the best writeup I found on the topic:

http://www.idevelopment.info/data/Unix/Linux/LINUX_Connec...

and indeed, that gent's userspace approach may well belie the arguments of those who say this needs to be kernel-side, all by itself.