From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Sep 20 17:57: 9 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from gizmo.internode.com.au (gizmo.internode.com.au [192.83.231.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C532614E84 for ; Mon, 20 Sep 1999 17:56:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from newton@gizmo.internode.com.au) Received: (from newton@localhost) by gizmo.internode.com.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) id KAA35335; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 10:24:52 +0930 (CST) (envelope-from newton) From: Mark Newton Message-Id: <199909210054.KAA35335@gizmo.internode.com.au> Subject: Re: what is devfs? To: mjacob@feral.com Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 10:24:52 +0930 (CST) Cc: newton@internode.com.au, julian@whistle.com, gurney_j@resnet.uoregon.edu, winter@jurai.net, chuckr@mat.net, wayne@crb-web.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Matthew Jacob" at Sep 20, 99 05:23:40 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Matthew Jacob wrote: > > Hmm - rip out the whole devfs infrastructure and replace it with something > > which writes tuples of (operation, devname, major, minor) to a socket > > somewhere, where "operation" is "create", "delete", "online", "offline", > > etc. Why worry about the complexities of a vfs to handle /dev in the > > kernel when almost all of it can be done in userland? > > > > [ Heh. *now* there'll be some wailing and gnashing of teeth... :-) ] > > "booting"? Not needed - The devfs registration stubs are called during driver initialization which happens at boot time anyway; When the devfsd starts up and reads messages from its socket, it'd get a queue of device instances. I'm envisaging something like /dev/log here; When syslog opens it at boot time, it gets all the log messages that have appeared during initialization. - mark ---- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82232999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message