From owner-freebsd-current Fri Mar 22 10:35:21 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id KAA20129 for current-outgoing; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 10:35:21 -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 KAA20118 for ; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 10:35:15 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA03010; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 11:29:04 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199603221829.LAA03010@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: PATCH: small, syntax changes for devfs To: scott@statsci.com Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 11:29:04 -0700 (MST) Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, phk@critter.tfs.com, current@FreeBSD.org, julian@ref.tfs.com, scrappy@ki.net In-Reply-To: from "Scott Blachowicz" at Mar 22, 96 09:35:10 am 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. > > Doesn't wd0s1 need to be a device file so you have something to run > disklabel against? Yes, but "reveal" doesn't mean you blow the others away. I dislike "potential" entries for non-clone devices, so "reveal" would be annoying otherwise, I think. This is really irrelevant to flat vs. non-flat name spaces. There is no reason why a device file can't be a directory and a file at the same time. Device reads and writes don't care about seek offsets and getdirentries() is a seperate call that can act on the fd using the fd's seek offset field entirely seperately from use as a device. Truly, getdirentries wants to take a seek offset as an argument instead of using the seek portion of the fd to avoid any possible conflict on seekable physical devices that have logical devices hierarchically associated with them. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.