From owner-freebsd-current Fri Mar 22 10:27:04 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA19617 for current-outgoing; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 10:27:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA19610 for ; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 10:27:02 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA02981; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 11:20:31 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199603221820.LAA02981@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: PATCH: small, syntax changes for devfs To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 11:20:31 -0700 (MST) Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, phk@critter.tfs.com, current@FreeBSD.ORG, julian@ref.tfs.com, scrappy@ki.net In-Reply-To: <199603220716.SAA24449@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Mar 22, 96 06:16:51 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > wd0s1 is there, and opening it would reveal wd0s1[a-h], but this isn't > much use. Perhaps wd0s1 should be a directory containing [a-h]. I > prefer a flat namespace. Why? It's possible, of course, to "chunk up" names, 2 characters at a time, to build a flat name space, but is this necessary or even desirable? At the very least, each device should be treated as a directory for the purposes of getdirents and the ISDIR attributes, anyway. It lets you have "status" and other information in the "directory". For the purposes of read/write, you treat it as a file. Consider: a device reference is a vnode reference in devfs: all lookup instances are predicated on the path to the devfs. That means I can access devices remotely without modifications (assuming no layer 5 differentiation between systems -- if B9600 isn't the same on both boxes, well, you're pretty much screwed). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.