Subject: device names

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 92 11:44:17 BST

I very much like Linus's suggestions, but I have one reservation.
The use of upper case/lower case to distinguish between 3.5/5.25
inch drives leaves us with no way of incorporating other sizes
into the pattern unless their disk geometries match one of these
two.  (In any case, I have already changed my /devs to
fd0H1440 and fd1h1200 and so forth.)
 
Standardising device names is a pain, since there is not a great
deal of uniformity among existing systems.  It may be tempting
to adopt names or name formats from elsewhere, which DOES have
the advantage of not adding to the muddle, but we must be
cautious about carrying over conventions which may hinder Linux's
usefulness.  I am no Unix beginner, but if it helps beginners,
I'm for it.  I say this because many will be (and already are)
using Linux who have little or no Unix experience, and we are
already seeing dozens of questions from them on comp/alt.os.linux
and elsewhere.
 
I was listening with an open mind (I hope) to the suggestion
that we abandon device-specific names in favour of generic names,
e.g., fd0 for all floppies on the first drive.  There is a lot
to be said for this kind of simplicity, which could, for example,
be created by an installation/configuration script, and I haven't
completely rejected it.  But among the problems I see with it,
one stands out in particular.  It is in fact necessary to have
different device names for differently formatted floppies in the
same drive.  This is partially because there is no generic way
of finding out the disk's parameters.  Moreover, I and most of
my users have many disks of many densities, so I can't see this
problem going away.
 
     -- Owen
     [email-masked]

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From: Paul Richards <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 92 3:26:00 WET DST

In reply to [email-masked] who said
> my users have many disks of many densities, so I can't see this

It obviously isn't necessary to have different device names since DOS
deals with this perfectly well and if DOS can do it we can certainly get
Linux to do it. Of course, someone will have to enlighten us as to how
DOS does it?

Since this is an option when the floppy is formatted is the  information
stored during the format in some way. It seems to me that this is a DOS
problem in any case. What you're saying is you have lots of DOS floppies
lying around of different densities. Are we going to base the device
names on this necessity? Are we really going to continue writing DOS
format floppies from within Linux? For that matter do we need floppies
apart from backing up? (Sorry I'm getting a bit ridiculous but these
points did cross my mind).

As an actual proposal. We can keep simple names by makinf the driver try
the most common density first. If an error occurs then try another one
and so on. If none of them work then report an error. Not ideal but it
does show its possible. Someone must know what DOS does?

-- 
  Paul Richards at Cardiff university, UK.

  [email-masked]	Internet: [email-masked]
  UUCP:     [email-masked] or ...!uunet!mcsun!ukc!cf!thor!spedpr
+++

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From: Chuck Boyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 92 08:10:54 -0700

At present we need to heat up this discussion, so that it can end
somewhere.... or just adopt a concensus standard (now) and let
everybody adjust. Whatever is best for programmers... let's do
it. I will adjust beginner's guide, etc./other things as necessary.
[email-masked]
chuck

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From: Pauli R{m| <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 20:38:41 GMT

Why can't the diskette drive type just be read from the cmos at bootup
like the info about hard disks? That way there should be no need to
use multiple device names (and minor numbers) for different types of
drives. The auto-detection would also be much easier, because the kernel
had to check for at most 2 densities. The density could of course be
checked by trying to read sector 10 from the first track (at least in
the case of 360k/1.2M and 720k/1.44M diskettes).

	Pauli