Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2003 10:15:04 +0200
From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
To: current@freebsd.org, arch@freebsd.org
Subject: DISCUSSION: /dev/fd%d.%d and /dev/{a}cd%d[ac] to be discontinued ?
Message-ID: <1031.1062663304@critter.freebsd.dk>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I am committing a BURN_BRIDGES patch which puts the density select devices of the floppy driver and the 'a' and 'c' compat partitions of the CD drivers on the chopping block for 6-current. There is no loss of functionality from this, the fdcontrol(8) utility allows even greater flexibility than the density select devices do for floppies and the 'a' and 'c' compat parititons can be simulated with symlinks from userland should any critical application be found to have hardcoded paths. The use of device cloning functions in disk drivers under GEOM is not as such impossible, but it would be quite complicated and I would rather avoid it unless we have much better killer apps for it than these two uses. As soon as these uses of cloning code has been removed, I will move the floppy and CD drivers under GEOM, paving the way for the significant changes to the buf/VM system which some of you have already heard rumours about. (more will emerge after BSDcon'03) And now comes the bit which I would like to offer for discussion: Should we do this for 5.2 instead ? By pulling this into 5.2, the divergence between 5-stable and 6-current can be managed much better, and we will be able to backport much more from 6-current to 5-stable than we would be able to otherwise. If we do not do this I fear that it will be close to impossible to MFC filesystem work in practice. And let me repeat: the only loss of functionality is the density select devices for floppy disks which will have to be done with the fdcontrol(8) utility instead. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?1031.1062663304>