MC wrote: >> Putting into the zpool command would feel odd to me, but I agree that >> there may be a useful utility here. >> > > There MAY be a useful utility here? I know this isn't your fight Dave, but > this tipped me and I have to say something :) > > Can we agree that the format command lists the disks it can use because the > format command is part of the user-facing disk storage software stack and > listing what objects it can act upon is one of the most fundemental features > of the user-facing tools of the stack?! It is for this reason alone that ZFS > needs a similar feature. Because it makes sense. >
I'd like to suggest a name: lsdisk and lspart to list the disks and also the disks/partitions that are available. (Or maybe lsdisk should just list the disks and partitions in an indented list? Listing the partitions is important. Listing the controllers might not hurt anything, either.) Linux has lspci[0], lsscsi, lsusb, lsof, and a number of other ls-tab-tab utilities out-of-the-box[1]. These utilities would be quite intuitive for folks who've learned Linux first, and would help people transition to Solaris quickly. When I first learned Solaris (some years ago now), it took me a surprisingly long time to get the device naming scheme and the partition numbering. The naming/numbering is quite intuitive (except for that part about c0t0d0s2 being the entire device[1]), but I would have felt that I understood it quicker if I'd seen a nice listing that matches the concept, and also had quick way to find out the name of that disk that I just plugged in. My friends who are new to Solaris seem to have the same problem out of the gate. -Luke [0] Including lspci and lsusb with Solaris would be a great idea -- prtconf and prtdiag are very useful, but lspci is very quick, clear, and concise. IIRC, lspci is included in Nexenta. I haven't checked for these utilities on the new OpenSolaris yet, though, so maybe they're there already. [1] Since Solaris 10 still uses /bin/sh as the root shell, I feel that I must explain that this is tab completion. In bash/zsh/tcsh, hitting tab twice searches the $PATH for ls* and displays the results.... I know that most-everyone on the list already knows this, but I can't help my self! [ducks!] [2] If I'm giving someone a tour of Solaris administration, /dev/sda isn't particularly different from /dev/dsk/c0t0d0. But if I open /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 with a partitioning tool, repartition, then build/mount a filesystem without Something Bad happening, then my spectators heads usually explode. After that, they don't believe me when I tell them that they mostly understand what's going on. Yes, ZFS and the EFI disklabels fix this when you have a system with a ZFS root and no UFS disks -- but UFS is still necessary in a lot of configuration, so this kind of system-quirk should be made obvious to Unix-literate people coming from non-Solaris backgrounds. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
