Why?:
There are occasions where userspace would like to access sysfs
attributes for a device but it may not know how sysfs has named the
device or the path. For example what is the sysfs path for
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3160827AS_5MT004CK? With this change a call to
stat(2) returns the major:minor then userspace can see that
/sys/dev/block/8:32 links to /sys/block/sdc.
What are the alternatives?:
1/ Add an ioctl to return the path: Doable, but sysfs is meant to reduce
the need to proliferate ioctl interfaces into the kernel, so this
seems counter productive.
2/ Use udev to create these symlinks: Also doable, but it adds a
udev dependency to utilities that might be running in a limited
environment like an initramfs.
3/ Do a full-tree search of sysfs.
[kay.sievers@vrfy.org: fix duplicate registrations]
[kay.sievers@vrfy.org: cleanup suggestions]
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Reviewed-by: SL Baur <steve@xemacs.org>
Acked-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Acked-by: Mark Lord <lkml@rtr.ca>
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Requiring userspace to close and re-open sysfs attributes has been the
policy since before 2.6.12. It allows userspace to get a consistent
snapshot of kernel state and consume it with incremental reads and seeks.
Now, if the file position is zero the kernel assumes userspace wants to see
the new value. The application for this change is to allow a userspace
RAID metadata handler to check the state of an array without causing any
memory allocations. Thus not causing writeback to a raid array that might
be blocked waiting for userspace to take action.
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Acked-by: Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
This patch fixes typos in various Documentation txts. This patch addresses
some words starting with the letters 'D'-'E'.
Signed-off-by: Matt LaPlante <kernel1@cyberdogtech.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Change filemode to use defines in stead of 0644,
based on suggestions by Walter Harms and Domen Puncer.
Signed-off-by: Jan Veldeman <Jan.Veldeman@advalvas.be>
Signed-off-by: Domen Puncer <domen@coderock.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Fix whitespace after comma between parameters.
Signed-off-by: Jan Veldeman <Jan.Veldeman@advalvas.be>
Signed-off-by: Domen Puncer <domen@coderock.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
