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On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@g.o> wrote: |
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> This does lead me to wonder if a light-weight udev could exist that lacks |
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> half or more of the functionality of the current udev. I'll be honest, I've |
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> only edited my udev rules file once, and that was only when I installed a |
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> Sun Happy Meal quad ethernet card in which all four ports utilize the same |
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> MAC address and udev doesn't handle this very gracefully (if I had Solaris, |
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> I could edit the card's firmware and change this setting). |
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|
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You know - I had a similar issue, but with a pair of PL2303 USB RS232 |
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interfaces. That makes me wonder if there is a possible way to |
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enhance udev to better handle situations where devices have no unique |
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ID and thus tend to be difficult to access consistently across |
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reboots. In my case I had to hack a rule so that I got a symlink if |
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the device was in a specific USB slot. Use case is controlling tuners |
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for mythtv. |
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|
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No doubt a simpler 80% solution could be created for udev, and likely |
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it would be easier to cut down on its dependencies as a result. |
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However, the other 20% of users will still need the more complete |
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solution. Big distros that want to support lots of hardware with a |
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one-size-fits-all configuration will just deploy that complete |
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solution everywhere, which means that the only people maintaining the |
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simple solution would be people who like to tailor each system. |
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|
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For most of the more enterprise-y OS providers (ie the ones with money |
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to pay devs), one-size-fits-all is a lot more sustainable. You won't |
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find an edition of MS Windows that works only on PCs without scanners |
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and sound but uses 50MB less RAM, for example. |
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|
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Sure, we don't have the same constraints as the enterprise-y distros, |
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but we do have the constraint that if we want to do things differently |
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we will spend a lot of time patching what we could otherwise simply |
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reuse as-is. |
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|
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I don't think that split filesystem installs are going away anytime |
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soon. In fact, when btrfs is finally mature we might see them |
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blossum. Using subvolumes you could have more granular snapshotting |
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and mount options, while still maintaining a shared disk space pool |
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(with granular quotas). If everything the distro is likely to mangle |
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is in a few subvolumes you can reverts snapshots on those without |
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losing changes in other subvolumes if you ran in production before |
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deciding to revert. That gets you a lot more flexibility than a |
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single snapshot on root - especially in terms of recovery time (you |
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can still copy files between snapshots if you only snapshotted root - |
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in fact with reflinks this is very fast). |
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|
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Rich |