From owner-freebsd-current Thu Mar 21 08:22:55 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id IAA17382 for current-outgoing; Thu, 21 Mar 1996 08:22:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from brasil.moneng.mei.com (brasil.moneng.mei.com [151.186.109.160]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id IAA17362 for ; Thu, 21 Mar 1996 08:22:51 -0800 (PST) Received: (from jgreco@localhost) by brasil.moneng.mei.com (8.7.Beta.1/8.7.Beta.1) id KAA02588; Thu, 21 Mar 1996 10:18:04 -0600 From: Joe Greco Message-Id: <199603211618.KAA02588@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Subject: Re: DEVFS vs "regular /dev" To: davidg@root.com Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 10:17:54 -0600 (CST) Cc: phk@critter.tfs.com, terry@lambert.org, julian@ref.tfs.com, scrappy@ki.net, current@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <199603211331.FAA05288@Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Mar 21, 96 05:31:11 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > If we do the mount in /sbin/init and it fails for some reason (like the > mount point doesn't exist), then we'll have no way to inform the operator > (there isn't a /dev/console to write to). If we do it in the kernel, we can > emit a message saying "/dev: not found" or something. They just got through arguing this in NetBSD's port-sun3 list (folks tend to forget to do the MAKEDEV every once in a while). It would seem to me that a little "special handling" for init would not be so bad, i.e. pass init file descriptors 0, 1, and 2 already pointing at the console, so that the console does not have to be accessible via the filesystem immediately. I know that there is some "ugh" associated with this, but it would seem the most robust method to provide USEFUL error trapping and reporting. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968