On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 08:45:38AM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:

For discussion I suggest /proc/ata/devices, a single flat file matching 
a name meaningful to open() with a vendor string and whatever other info 
is handy, like serial number and the like.

Why just ATA? Let it contain all disk-like devices in the system, and
add an extra field showing the transport method
(IDE/USB/SCSI/SATA/whatever) the device is currently using.

Hmm, /sys/block already contains all the kernel-internal device names,
/sys/block/*/device already gives the physical location. We might just
need a couple additional attributes (like "serial") for user
convenience, and a little shell script that walks /sys/block and emits
an unified device list?

Alternatively, the shell scipt could use blktool to collect the data not
already present under /sys/block, so there would be no need to modify
the kernel at all. blktool could be modified to accept a path name under
/sys/block as well as a device node, and print some more data the serial
number when using the "id" command, but I think that's doable.

Gabor

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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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