Re: Why are drives called "wd0", "wd1", etc?

[Steven Bellovin <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Aug 4, 2011, at 8:27 02AM, Daniel Carrera wrote:

> On 08/04/2011 02:16 PM, Stephen Borrill wrote:
>> On Thu, 4 Aug 2011, Daniel Carrera wrote:
>>> On 08/04/2011 12:49 PM, Martin Husemann wrote:
>>>> Also "man wd" explains the drivers inheritage:
>>>> 
>>>> DESCRIPTION
>>>> The wd driver supports hard disks that emulate the Western Digital
>>>> WD100x. This includes standard MFM, RLL, ESDI, IDE, and EIDE drives.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Thanks. That's very interesting. I didn't realize that something like
>>> that would be in a man page.
>> 
>> Having useful man pages is another difference between Linux and NetBSD...
> 
> 
> That may be true, but I don't think that this thread is an example. After the 
> first reply in this thread I checked and confirmed that my Linux also 
> documents at least devices in the man pages. I can do "man sd" and find out 
> that this is for SCSI disks.
> 
> It just had never occurred to me to type "man sd" before.
> 
Going back further, there's an ancient tradition in the Unix world of
naming device names (especially visible for disks and network interfaces)
after the hardware type.  But it isn't always easy to find a meaningful
two-letter abbreviation...  Linux, from that perspective, broke the
tradition by abstracting that away and dealing only with large classes
of devices such as hd.


                --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb