Accessing disks via their serial numbers.

[John-Mark Gurney]

Warner Losh wrote this message on Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 17:48 -0600:
> In message: <20060624174331.GB2134 at garage.freebsd.pl>
>             Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at freebsd.org> writes:
> : I'd like to extend glabel(8) to create providers related to disks based
> : on their serial numbers and everntually driver name.
> : For example disk ad0 could also be accessed via /dev/disk/ata/3JX0LMGA
> : (/dev/disk/<driver>/<serial> or /dev/disk/<serial>).
> 
> /dev/disk/ad/3JX0LMGA or /dev/disk/da/3JX0LMGA is the only thing
> you'll be able to do.  There's no mapping from the dev_t -> device_t,
> so you have no way of knowing what the parent of the disk's dev_t.
> All the I/O in the system is done with dev_t's.
> 
> Also, the cam system doesn't hook into the newbus system due to when
> it was authored.  There's been some resistance to moving the scsi
> devices into the device_t tree, like all other storage devices.  This
> is part of the problem indoing thinging completely generically.

Can't we expand the disk api?  add a const char *d_serial to the struct
disk, and have the disk api automaticly propegate the serial number up
to the geom layer?

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."