From owner-freebsd-current Tue Jun 23 21:27:48 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id VAA22118 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Tue, 23 Jun 1998 21:27:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from nomis.simon-shapiro.org ([209.86.126.163]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA22080 for ; Tue, 23 Jun 1998 21:27:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from shimon@nomis.Simon-Shapiro.ORG) Received: (qmail 23993 invoked by uid 1000); 24 Jun 1998 04:27:52 -0000 Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.3 [p0] on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <199806232113.FAA08470@spinner.netplex.com.au> Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 00:27:52 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: shimon@simon-shapiro.org Organization: The Simon Shapiro Foundation From: Simon Shapiro To: Peter Wemm Subject: Re: Heads up: block devices to disappear! Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, Poul-Henning Kamp , Chuck Robey Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 23-Jun-98 Peter Wemm wrote: ... some excellent explanations deleted ... I still fail to see why these have to be removed, changed or modified in any way. The savings in kernel size are minimal. The block device being a ``subset'' of the char device is one view. Another view is that the character device is an extention to the block device. They are fundamentally different creatures. While I have rarely used the block device for anything but mounting filesystems, I have used them more than once, when needing to do high speed I/O to a partition, while still wanting the kernel to buffer the I/O, as in userspace filesystems, storage managers for databases, and toehr such creatures. I'd suggest we leave these alone. They hurt no one and come handly at times. The contortions needed to implement block devices on top of character devices without having block devices are hardly worth the fuss. Simon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message