From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jun 4 06:45:37 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C985E37B401 for ; Wed, 4 Jun 2003 06:45:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0A39F43F93 for ; Wed, 4 Jun 2003 06:45:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Received: from fledge.watson.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fledge.watson.org (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h54DiSOn051771 for ; Wed, 4 Jun 2003 09:44:28 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Received: from localhost (robert@localhost)h54DiSWX051768 for ; Wed, 4 Jun 2003 09:44:28 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 09:44:28 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: ports@FreeBSD.org Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: linux_base and devfs on 5.x: what to do about character devices X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 13:45:38 -0000 It was recently brought to my attention that some users of FreeBSD have somewhat populated /compat/linux/dev trees with hard-coded character device entries in there. Often, this seems to occur on upgrded 4.x machines running on 5.x The problem with this is that we're in the throes of gradually moving away from hard-coded major device numbers, so those entries will grow increasingly inaccurate over time. I'd like to find out a bit more about how /dev is managed in linux compat land, what ports do special things with it, and how we can make sure that the linux compat code runs without any hitches on 5.2-RELEASE when we go -STABLE. >From a 5.x technical perspective, any ideal solution would avoid any character device nodes anywhere outside of /dev, so that would mean avoiding any entries in a linux-compat-specific dev, or making sure they are symlinks to the real /dev, or the like. Feedback very welcome! Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects robert@fledge.watson.org Network Associates Laboratories