From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Mar 8 9:59:48 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1D75B37B41A for ; Fri, 8 Mar 2002 09:59:43 -0800 (PST) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id g28HxfNH154108; Fri, 8 Mar 2002 12:59:41 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <20020308020009.A6535@iguana.icir.org> References: <20020308020009.A6535@iguana.icir.org> Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 12:59:40 -0500 To: Luigi Rizzo , arch@FreeBSD.ORG From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: Proposed patch: kern.bootdev* sysctl variables Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.3 (www dot roaringpenguin dot com slash mimedefang) Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 2:00 AM -0800 3/8/02, Luigi Rizzo wrote: >Any objection to the following patch to i386/i386/autoconf.c >to let userland apps know [an approximation of] the name >of the device the kernel was booted from ? > >The main use would be for startup scripts, such as /etc/rc, >which could this way differentiate their behaviour based >on the returned result. I definitely like the goal. >(I know it can be perfected by not assuming that >any hard disk is /dev/ad, but you get the idea...) My machines tend to have scsi drives (and some of them have only scsi hard drives), and I can also boot off of CD's. If something like this is added, I think it pretty much has to give the correct answer in all cases. If not, it should give a helpful clue, but not guess at the answer and then present that guess as fact.. Ie, instead of "/dev/ad%ds%d", maybe return "disk%ds%d"... -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message