From owner-freebsd-chat  Wed Feb 13  1:51:38 2002
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Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 01:51:14 -0800
From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
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To: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
Cc: Chip Wiegand <chip@wiegand.org>,
	freebsd-chat <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: file types
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Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 1:12 AM -0800 2002/02/13, Terry Lambert wrote:
> >  FreeBSD doesn't have block devices.
> 
>         I remember that this changed recently.  However, I don't recall
> ever hearing a good, understandable explanation as to why.  Do you
> have any, or know of any URLs where such could be found?

Ask PHK.  It was my strong opinion that they would be needed
to port over the Apple UDF FS code; that objection has been
overridden by someone doing the necessary work to wedge UDF
on top of a character driver (no idea how demand paging from
non-aligned atomic regions is handled in the UDF/ISOFS switch;
I'd have to buy hardware to look at the code in any meaningful
way).


> >  If you are using one of the millions of software packages
> >  from the Internet, you will have to modify it to use device
> >  aligned buffer I/O, effectively duplicating the block
> >  device functionality in each and every user space program
> >  instead.
> 
>         I'm wondering why pseudo-block devices weren't created that would
> effectively automatically do this on top of the appropriate character
> device for applications that expect this kind of behaviour.

Ask PHK.

-- Terry

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