Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 06:55:17 -0700 (PDT) From: "Duane H. Hesser" <dhh@androcles.com> To: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Heads up: block devices to disappear! Message-ID: <XFMail.980626071226.dhh@androcles.com> In-Reply-To: <199806241401.KAA04665@lakes.dignus.com>
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As a starting point, I'd recommend "Unix Implementation" by K. Thompson. It is part of the Unix 7th Edition manual documentation, available at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol2/implement All of volumes 1 and 2 of the V7 manuals are available there (except the C Reference Manual). The document does discuss block and character devices. In addition, the three paragraph introduction to the paper has come to represent (to me) the most succinct expression of the "philosophy of Unix", although I confess that it took me 8-10 years to understand it (I'm not real quick, but persistent). There are a couple of other papers there (e.g. vol2/setup and vol2/cacm.bun) which are interesting to those who might be interested in regaining the ground under Unix's feet. BTW, the documents are in troff 'ms' format. 'groff -ms' does a pretty good job (except for a few 'refer' format references). On 24-Jun-98 Thomas David Rivers wrote: >Terry Lambert writes: >> had in no other fashion. Let's meake sure that the block device interface >> is not in the same [complex but useful - ed.] category before summarily >> executing it. > > In a similar context - I'd like to ask some simple questions. > > Can anyone clearly state why they were needed in UNIX at it's offset? > > Once that is understood - is it still the case, or has it been obviated > in some way? > > I believe answers to these questions would be illuminating for the > nervous amongst us (I count myself in the 'nervous' category on this one.) > > The reason I call for caution is simple - these have been with UNIX > a long time... if they could have been simplified at the offset, why > weren't they? What's different now? > > I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'd just like to understand what's > changed from 20+ years ago... > > - Dave Rivers - > > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org >with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > -------------- Duane H. Hesser dhh@androcles.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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