> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you wrote: > > : It doesn't really matter if a 152X gets detected before a high-power > : whiz-bang SCSI-matic 2010 PCI adapter, because you can still put root > : on any SCSI controller you like. > > You are correct, of course, Jeff, but the problem with having a card like > a 15[12]X recognized first is that if you have machines like mine, which all > have one fast controller that's always there and has the root on it, and you > then stick 1510's in from time to time when you need to temporarily hang > an external disk chassis on, or put a tape drive on, or something else that > is transitory, you have to go through contortions to boot because what > normally would be the 0th SCSI controller isn't any more, though it may be > again shortly.
Agreed, that's a problem. Moving the probes around doesn't really solve it: someone switching to Debian from Slackware will find their SCSI controllers detected in reverse order, for example. It's a no-win situation. > This seems unfortunate. The other OS's I've had experience with (and there > are many on the list) always made it possible to either nail down hard where > the root disk was going to be, physically, or they sequenced driver discovery > "correctly" to handle this case. None have been perfect for all cases, but > all treated my needs better than Linux currently does. You're onto something here. I wonder how difficult it would be to add something to the partition tables to nail down drives to devices. Windows NT, for example, does _something_ when you run it's fdisk program that lets you re-order drives. We'd need to extend the kernel for this, and fdisk and cfdisk would need to be updated. I'm not up for the kernel work required, but since I have the dubious distinction of fdisk maintainer, I would be willing to work on that part. :) Are there any kernel hackers lurking about that might have an idea as to how difficult a project this would be? Does the Linux RAID stuff already have provisions for this? > I'm not going to get upset no matter what Simon decides to do, because I > suspect I'll be building custom kernels for most of my machines no matter > what, but I wanted to make sure that the "silliness" of the current approach > in my eyes got registered someewhere and fed back upstream. I'm not running Debian kernels either. PPP 2.2.X is still broken, for example, and I don't want to be forced to use it. 2.1.2d works just fine in a stock 1.2.13 kernel. Thanks, Jeff
