On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 15:30, Tejun Heo [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Milan Broz [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Maybe, but this was not invented in DM/MD camp:-)
Probably Kay or Greg can answer why it was done this way?

It's not from Greg or Kay. It just appeared some day in the context of dm. :)

And yes, symlinks *look* nice and simple for the outside, but they are
not, and have all sorts of problems like non-atomic updates, make it
impossible to ever rename a device (as long as they copy the device
name), and and and .... we should not add more of this.

quoted

If btrfs internally creates some virtual _block_ device for its pool, it should
present it here too with slaves/holders. If not, why it should create any links there?

Yeah, that's the most bothering part for me.  The biggest customers of
bd_claim are filesystems and all these custom symlinkeries don't do
nothing for them.  It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Btrfs does not use any blockdev as the master for good reason, and it
can never map its slaves inside of /sys/block. Simple meta-blockdevs
like md/dm just don't fit into modern requirements of a filesystem
(directory snapshots, directory subvolumes, complex raids, hassle-free
resizing, ...)  -- hence btrfs is much more like a network-filesystem
mount than a stream of blocks like a disk, and does not fit at all
into this model.

Kay