Re: Bug#381150: still not able to handle partitionable arrays

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Mon, 7 May 2007 22:00:50 +0200,
Robert Millan wrote:
> 
> On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 09:03:48PM +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> > On Saturday 05 May 2007 01:29, Robert Millan wrote:
> > > It seems there are problems with accessing software RAID in devices with
> > > pathnames like /dev/md_d0p1
> > 
> > Is there any specification about device names on Linux? I have been seeing 
> > Linux adding more and more new inconsistent device names for years, and it 
> > seems to be no end in this game.

The best part is actually that it's not the only name, from the mdadm manpage:

"""
The standard names for non-partitioned arrays (the only sort of md array 
available in 2.4 and earlier) either of

              /dev/mdNN
              /dev/md/NN

where NN is a number.  The standard names for partitionable arrays (as 
available from 2.6 onwards) is one of

              /dev/md/dNN
              /dev/md_dNN

Partition numbers should be indicated by added "pMM" to these, thus 
"/dev/md/d1p2". 
"""

> Not that I know of.  But a few days ago I was toying with the idea that grub
> could theoreticaly become device path agnostic.  Maybe this doesn't apply to
> specific things like software RAID / LVM, but for most weird devices it's
> probably feasible.

I've been thinking about that too, because the current way seems a bit
fragile. But then you're looking up the device major and minor number
for partionable RAID arrays and you see that it's in the
"LOCAL/EXPERIMENTAL USE" range. Not very useful either...

Jeroen Dekkers