From d0985394e7fee6b25a7cc8335d45bc1c1a8ab2d3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Tejun Heo Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:03:55 +0100 Subject: block: Revert "[SCSI] genhd: add a new attribute "alias" in gendisk" This reverts commit a72c5e5eb738033938ab30d6a634b74d1d060f10. The commit introduced alias for block devices which is intended to be used during logging although actual usage hasn't been committed yet. This approach adds very limited benefit (raw log might be easier to follow) which can be trivially implemented in userland but has a lot of problems. It is much worse than netif renames because it doesn't rename the actual device but just adds conveninence name which isn't used universally or enforced. Everything internal including device lookup and sysfs still uses the internal name and nothing prevents two devices from using conflicting alias - ie. sda can have sdb as its alias. This has been nacked by people working on device driver core, block layer and kernel-userland interface and shouldn't have been upstreamed. Revert it. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1155104 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.scsi/68632 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.scsi/69776 Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman Acked-by: Kay Sievers Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" Cc: Nao Nishijima Cc: Alan Cox Cc: Al Viro Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe --- Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block | 13 ------------- 1 file changed, 13 deletions(-) (limited to 'Documentation/ABI') diff --git a/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block b/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block index 2b5d56127fc..c1eb41cb987 100644 --- a/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block +++ b/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block @@ -206,16 +206,3 @@ Description: when a discarded area is read the discard_zeroes_data parameter will be set to one. Otherwise it will be 0 and the result of reading a discarded area is undefined. -What: /sys/block//alias -Date: Aug 2011 -Contact: Nao Nishijima -Description: - A raw device name of a disk does not always point a same disk - each boot-up time. Therefore, users have to use persistent - device names, which udev creates when the kernel finds a disk, - instead of raw device name. However, kernel doesn't show those - persistent names on its messages (e.g. dmesg). - This file can store an alias of the disk and it would be - appeared in kernel messages if it is set. A disk can have an - alias which length is up to 255bytes. Users can use alphabets, - numbers, "-" and "_" in alias name. This file is writeonce. -- cgit v1.2.3-18-g5258