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Why?:
There are occasions where userspace would like to access sysfs
attributes for a device but it may not know how sysfs has named the
device or the path. For example what is the sysfs path for
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3160827AS_5MT004CK? With this change a call to
stat(2) returns the major:minor then userspace can see that
/sys/dev/block/8:32 links to /sys/block/sdc.
What are the alternatives?:
1/ Add an ioctl to return the path: Doable, but sysfs is meant to reduce
the need to proliferate ioctl interfaces into the kernel, so this
seems counter productive.
2/ Use udev to create these symlinks: Also doable, but it adds a
udev dependency to utilities that might be running in a limited
environment like an initramfs.
3/ Do a full-tree search of sysfs.
[kay.sievers@vrfy.org: fix duplicate registrations]
[kay.sievers@vrfy.org: cleanup suggestions]
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Reviewed-by: SL Baur <steve@xemacs.org>
Acked-by: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Acked-by: Mark Lord <lkml@rtr.ca>
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
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