Subject: Devices

From: Damiano Bolla <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 92 11:10:05 +0100

> The drivers should take care of this for you, like the SCSI drivers 
> do, so that no matter what SCSI adapter you have (currently, 
> Ultrastor and Seagate adapters are supported, RSN Adaptec, and soon
> DTC and CSC adapters) do, you only have one /dev/sd* set of devices,
> and one set of major/minor numbers to deal with.

Umhhh, the point is that people might want to have in the same system
A wd drive
A Scsi drive
A colorado tape
A soundblaster

or any other kind of hardware combination....
Believe me the amount of rubbish for PC is MUCH more that an average
workstation can even dream :-)
You can't leave it to the kernel ONLY,you need some sort of way to 
tell to the kernel what to use.

You can do this at install time by creating the devices using different
major and minor depending ont he hardware you have.
OR you can have all possible combination of stuff as a preinstalled
device name.

If you choose the second method you need to make distinctions.

I think that this discussion showed that the task will be a bit hard....

What about s shell script that create devices on demand ?
Something like

makedevice scsi

Create the scsi devices

makdevice colorado

Create the colorado devices

This will keep the /dev/directory short.....

Anyway the device naming blues will not finish with this system
The device names MUST be unique for ANY possible hardware combination
After all you newer Know what you are going to install .....

I like the idea of
[device type][device brand][attributes ]

Each part being a maximum of three chars.
Ex:

fdscsi0
fdwd0
mtcolr0
flp1.2mb	The 1.2mb floppy
flp1.4mb	The 1.44 mb floppy
flp2.0mb	The future 2.0 mb ?....

and so on....

For the serial lines it hink it will be nice to stay with 

ttys1
ttys2

and so on

the pty can be something
ttyp1	The slave part have p since s is used by the serial )
ttyp2

and

ttym1	The master part of a pty
ttym2

Remembar, it the thing is cannot be extended sooner or later (by Murphy)
you will hit the limit. Therefore, it is better if the standard
can be expanded without creating conflicts.

Damiano