From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 9 08:13:52 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7B6ED16A4B3 for ; Thu, 9 Oct 2003 08:13:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sizone.org (mortar.sizone.org [65.126.154.242]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7AE9143FE3 for ; Thu, 9 Oct 2003 08:13:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dgilbert@daveg.ca) Received: by sizone.org (Postfix, from userid 66) id 9483A302A5; Thu, 9 Oct 2003 11:13:48 -0400 (EDT) Received: by canoe.dclg.ca (Postfix, from userid 101) id 76A661D1DC6; Thu, 9 Oct 2003 10:02:35 -0400 (EDT) From: David Gilbert MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <16261.27258.563735.274938@canoe.dclg.ca> Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 10:02:34 -0400 To: "Daniel O'Connor" In-Reply-To: <200310071929.30826.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> References: <3F8279C5.9070300@ecsd.com> <200310071929.30826.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> X-Mailer: VM 7.14 under 21.4 (patch 12) "Portable Code" XEmacs Lucid cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org cc: ecsd Subject: Re: cannot create partition entries for /dev/ad3 X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 15:13:52 -0000 >>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel O'Connor writes: Daniel> The only reason most people will ever touch /dev is to either Daniel> make devices (hence no longer necessary with devfs), or change Daniel> permissions. The later is more difficult with devfs, but IMHO Daniel> the tradeoff is worthwhile. This brings me to my (small) beef with devfs. When you invoke an abstraction, a metric of the usefulness of that abstraction is how well the abstractions metaphors map onto the target system's metaphors. So as a filesystem, devfs does will by replicating the average person's view of should be in /dev ... subject to what devices are actually found... But filesystems also have persistence. In the trivial case, the persistence of the object (say ... a disk) preserved the filesystems node. But if I walk into /dev and change the permissions on a node, this persists only until the next reboot. Now... part of the problem here is that there is no simple interface for the kernel to access (and update) a file ... which might be an easy way to store persistence... but that's all a larger design problem. Now we do have the /etc/devfs.conf ... but this doesn't (yet) approach the topic of devices added and removed from the system. Maybe this is a natural extension for devd. Dave. Dave. -- ============================================================================ |David Gilbert, Independent Contractor. | Two things can only be | |Mail: dave@daveg.ca | equal if and only if they | |http://daveg.ca | are precisely opposite. | =========================================================GLO================ -- ============================================================================ |David Gilbert, Independent Contractor. | Two things can only be | |Mail: dave@daveg.ca | equal if and only if they | |http://daveg.ca | are precisely opposite. | =========================================================GLO================