Re: [gentoo-user] Who/what names hard drives /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc

[Fast Turtle <fturtle@gmail.com>]

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The /dev/ (h/s)da is actually from the kernel itself with the (H) being
deprecated as it's from the old ide/pata setup (hda was always ide 0-0
(same setup grub uses) designated as master) while 0-1 was the slave. 1-0
would then be hdb while 0-1 would have been hdc with hdd being 1-1 (the
last two being slaves).

The (S) designation is due to the change in the kernel hardware subsystem,
where they started moving all of the various drive types to a single,
simpler uniform setup based around the scsi code. It's also why when
manually configuring a kernel, if you enable usb storage (flash/sd/mmc)
you're told you need scsi support in the help.

All of these changes have been implemented by the kernel team comprised of
Linus Torvald and all of the maintainers for the express purpose of
simplifying the code base while reusing as much of the existing code as
possible in a far more modular manner - easier to fix/maintain and by
becoming more modular, it's easier to add new features to the kernel as
they're developed, which is why if you look at the configuration of a 3.4
series compared to the 3.8 you see lots of things have and are being moved.


On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 9:16 PM, Chris Stankevitz
<chrisstankevitz@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Who or what decides to name a hard drive /dev/sda vs /dev/sdb?
>
> How does it decide what order to enumerate the drives on my computer?
>
> When in the boot process does is a disk given a name like "/dev/sda"?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Chris
>
>

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