From: zlsiial@uts.mcc.ac.uk (A. V. Le Blanc) Subject: Re: Device names (was Re: ttys2 not responding) Date: 22 Jul 1992 11:02:37 GMT
In article <1992Jul19.163907.15892@doc.ic.ac.uk> ajt@swan.doc.ic.ac.uk (Tony Travis) writes:
>Rob.Levin@f217.n3802.z1.fidonet.org (Rob Levin) writes:
>This is very confusing - drive _letters_ are a DOS anachronism and
>should have no place in Linux. Drives should be numbered starting at
>0 and partitions should be given letters starting a 'a' so eg....
When Linux first came out, its hard disks were numbered /dev/hd0, /dev/hd1.
We changed somewhere around 0.12 or thereabouts; this was in no way a
feature imported from MS-DOS; moreover I don't think there was ever a
version of MS-DOS which called its hard disks A and B.
Having corrected this historical inaccuracy, I am puzzled about the
origins of the 'should' which you cite. This question has been discussed
over and over on the Linux standards mailing list. Those people who
believe Linux must do everything the way BSD does prefer the numbered
drives, but there are important advantages to doing it the other way
round; for example, Linux allows many more partitions on a disk than
BSD does.
A further consideration is this: virtually all Linux systems currently
installed use /dev/hda and /dev/hdb for the drive devices; even SCSI
systems which don't have hardware corresponding to /dev/hda have the
device in the /dev directory.
If you wish to continue this discussion, you might do so on the
list linux-standards@banjo.concert.net; I wouldn't mind arguing
against your view in E-mail either. But please don't publish
prejudices as absolute truths.
-- Owen
LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk