GitLab

Why?:
There are occasions where userspace would like to access sysfs
attributes for a device but it may not know how sysfs has named the
device or the path.  For example what is the sysfs path for
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3160827AS_5MT004CK?  With this change a call to
stat(2) returns the major:minor then userspace can see that
/sys/dev/block/8:32 links to /sys/block/sdc.

What are the alternatives?:
1/ Add an ioctl to return the path: Doable, but sysfs is meant to reduce
   the need to proliferate ioctl interfaces into the kernel, so this
   seems counter productive.

2/ Use udev to create these symlinks: Also doable, but it adds a
   udev dependency to utilities that might be running in a limited
   environment like an initramfs.

3/ Do a full-tree search of sysfs.

[kay.sievers@vrfy.org: fix duplicate registrations]
[kay.sievers@vrfy.org: cleanup suggestions]

Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Kay ...