From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Jan 15 8:52:18 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 45C1B37B401; Wed, 15 Jan 2003 08:52:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 85D4843EB2; Wed, 15 Jan 2003 08:52:16 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) Received: from grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (grasshopper.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.30]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id h0FGqFro001374 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO); Wed, 15 Jan 2003 11:52:15 -0500 (EST) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (8.11.6/8.9.1) id h0FGqA875906; Wed, 15 Jan 2003 11:52:10 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15909.37306.656490.486061@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 11:52:10 -0500 (EST) To: Poul-Henning Kamp Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HEADSUP: DEVFS and GEOM mandatorification timeline. In-Reply-To: <14715.1042634253@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <14715.1042634253@critter.freebsd.dk> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 12) "Channel Islands" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Speaking of /dev, driver writers, and API/ABI decisions to be made before the 5.0-stable brach, I've got a minor axe to grind. Factory devices. Weren't you talking about changing the driver interface in such a way as to make factory devices easier to implement on FreeBSD? I would *love* to see this in 5.0-stable so that I don't have to support the clunky old way I came up with to handle it (conjuring a vnode out of thin air..) Or am I all wet, and its easy to do now? What I'm after is passing the struct file all the way down to open,close,ioctl,mmap,etc, and having a void * field in struct file that a driver can hang a softc pointer off of. That way an application can always open /dev/foo0 and not have to hunt around in the /dev namespace, looking for an unused minor /dev/foo299. The driver just looks at the struct file pointer it gets in ioctl for example, and isn't limited to the major/minor number of the underlying dev_t. This would be a real boon to people porting linux drivers (aka, vmware). Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message