Re: CD writing in future Linux (stirring up a hornets' nest)

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 12:01:48AM -0500, Daniel Barkalow wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 04:06:39PM -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > > 
> > > The kernel could provide a list of devices by category. It doesn't have 
> > > to name them, run scripts, give descriptions, or paint them blue. Just a 
> > > list of all block devices, tapes, by major/minor and category (ie. 
> > > block, optical, floppy) would give the application layer a chance to do 
> > > it's own interpretation.
> > 
> > It does so today in sysfs, that is what it is there for.
> 
> sysfs doesn't do quite that level of categorization; if it did, cdrom_id 
> would be unnecessary.

What?  cdrom_id queries the device directly to get some specific
information about the device, much like any other type of device query
(lspci, lsusb, etc.)

And yes, it would be nice if some of that information was also exported
through sysfs, and as always, patches are gladly accpeted.

> It would be nice if you could do 
> "grep 1 /sys/block/*/burns_cds" and get a list of all the block devices in 
> your system that burn cds. (You can currently get a list of all of the 
> removable block devices in your system, but not much else.)

Well, I can see if they are disks or cdroms through sysfs quite easily,
removable or not, so you do get more information than you expect.

> The kernel must know a bunch of this sort of stuff, and it would be nice 
> if the information available. (In fact, there's a lot that's in /proc/ide 
> that isn't in /sys, which is a bit annoying, since it would be useful in 
> /sys, especially if it would mean that you could ignore details of what 
> kind of bus things were on.)

I agree, again, feel free to submit patches.

thanks,

greg k-h
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