From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Mar 15 15:13:45 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id PAA26734 for freebsd-stable-outgoing; Sun, 15 Mar 1998 15:13:45 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from fledge.watson.org (root@FLEDGE.RES.CMU.EDU [128.2.91.116]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA26712 for ; Sun, 15 Mar 1998 15:13:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from robert@cyrus.watson.org) Received: from trojanhorse.pr.watson.org (trojanhorse.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.10]) by fledge.watson.org (8.8.8/8.6.10) with SMTP id SAA12662; Sun, 15 Mar 1998 18:13:00 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 18:12:16 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@trojanhorse.pr.watson.org Reply-To: Robert Watson To: Mike Smith cc: Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group , gkshenaut@ucdavis.edu, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DEVFS (was Re: More problems with new slice code ) In-Reply-To: <199803152242.OAA12236@dingo.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk On Sun, 15 Mar 1998, Mike Smith wrote: > > Will it still be possible to create/use device nodes with mknod, etc, > > elsewhere in the file system? > > No. The whole 'major/minor' number concept will ultimately be phased > out, and device identifiers will be dynamically assigned. This > basically makes static device nodes unuseful. > > Having said that, it will indeed be possible to have device nodes > appear in more than one place, and have different permissions etc. in > those separate places, which is I think what you are getting at > (chrooted environments, etc.) This is, indeed, what I had in mind -- it might be desirable to have a chroot'd daemon have access to a device. I was also wondering about NFS-exported devices, but with a devfs that is not really an issue. > If you're interested in getting a taste of this (and providing valuable > feedback early in the picture), there are patches for -current which > impement large portions of this already. See > http://www.freebsd.org/~julian for more. I may give that a try on one of our -current test machines in a week or so -- the -current Coda port is underway, and seeing how /dev/cfs0 (the coda device for Vice<->Kernel communication) behaves dynamically would be useful. Thanks for the information; this sounds like a great feature for reducing administrative load and preventing nasties :). Robert N Watson Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cmu.edu/ SafePort Network Services http://www.safeport.com/ robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message