On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 01:12:10AM +1030, Brett Lymn wrote:
> I shifted the sysctl node setups for disknames and diskstats into
> subr_drive.c and renamed the sysctl nodes to drivenames and
> drivestats. 

> In userland I backed out the changes to vmstat and renamed dkstat.c to
> drvstat.c to better reflect the non-disk related nature of the new
> file.  Note that due to the sysctl numbers being the same an old
> userland will work fine with the updated kernel code.

I think it won't - any code that wants disknames will now get disks+tapes
together. Also, userland is not restricted to numbers, it can also use
names. Shell scripts usually do.

I hope that backward compatibility won't be broken in the way you propose.
Why not leave hw.disknames as it is and add hw.tapenames?

Pavel Cahyna