Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2002 10:53:54 +0200 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> Cc: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: HEADSUP! GEOM as default in 5 days... Message-ID: <85978.1033548834@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Oct 2002 18:41:20 %2B1000." <20021002180920.P4712-100000@gamplex.bde.org>
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In message <20021002180920.P4712-100000@gamplex.bde.org>, Bruce Evans writes: >This could have been done without devfs by mapping names of special files >to numeric indexes in the kernel. Putting the index in the inode is mainly >an efficiency hack. Numeric indexes work quite well in the kernel (better >than pointers in the current implementation, since most drivers prefer to >work with numbers and call the inefficient replacements of the major() and >minor macros a lot). This is actually not true any more. An increasing number of drivers derive their softc pointer directly from the dev_t without the detour over compile-time-fixed-sized arrays of possible unit numbers. >> In the meantime, DEVFS is the best I could come up with which makes >> life simpler for users, developers and administrators, and still >> retains as many of the flaws as we want to keep. > >For me, it has saved about 10 minutes of admin time and cost a few >working weeks of development time so far. I don't think you are anywhere near the mean, or the median for that matter, of FreeBSD users. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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