Adieu, Fedora

[Marcus D. Leech]

> mount point and the desktop icon (on my F13/GNOME system).
> The problem continued to exist when I went to F14, and is still there
> now that I've switched to XFCE.  My main complaint isn't that it doesn't
> work, it's that the USB devs refused to even admit that their software
> wasn't reporting the label, even when presented with evidence directly
> contradicting their claim.  Yes, it's up to the DE to make use of the
> label but claiming that it's reported when it is not, isn't the best way
> to go, IMO.
There are four items that are inherent to a USB Flash drive, regardless 
of what type of filesystem you've formatted it for:

P:  Vendor=0781 ProdID=5406 Rev= 0.10
S:  Manufacturer=SanDisk
S:  Product=U3 Cruzer Micro
S:  SerialNumber=0000183B6773F834

Which of those four items do you think should "show up automatically" 
when you plug in the drive?

I'll note that my desktop environment seems to automatically display the 
volume label, which for mkfsed volumes appears to be a long
   hexadecimal volume label.

The fact that the above items show up when you look at 
/proc/bus/usb/devices, means that the driver has them, and likely 
exposes them
   via an IOCTL.  Whether the desktop environment actually *uses* that 
IOCTL to query the device is another matter.

But it isn't the *drivers* responsibility to read and understand the 
data that is stored on the device--that's up to higher layers in the system.
   Devices drivers, in general, know very little about the "meaning" of 
the data on the devices they control.  They're function in life is to
   dutifully shuffle data back and forth, and provide interfaces to 
control the attributes of the device.

Now, I'm not going to excuse rudeness on the part of the USB device 
driver guys, but higher-layer "understanding" of the data on a drive
   is clearly not the domain of a device driver or the writers of same.

So, when your "can't get any label information" drive is plugged in, can 
you find it under /proc/bus/usb/devices?  And if so, what
   device information is available for it?

If there's some type of non-standard "data blob" that contains the 
information you seek, then unless the USB driver is "taught" how to 
understand
   said blob, then it remains a blob of unkown purpose and shape to the 
driver.  Even if the driver said "dear USB drive, tell me all the blobs you
   have", it can only do sensible things with the blobs it understands, 
and said blobs are typically encapsulated in a documented standard
   somewhere.  Non-standard blobs are kind of hit and miss.  If there 
are non-standard "blobs" that "everyone just knows", then support for
   them in the driver is much more likely than blobs that are deeply 
proprietary, or require unpleasant legal machinations to discover the
   semantics of such blobs.


-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org