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Date:      Sat, 30 May 1998 06:00:08 +0200
From:      Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: I see one major problem with DEVFS...
Message-ID:  <19980530060008.33353@follo.net>
In-Reply-To: <17374.896500321@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Fri, May 29, 1998 at 08:52:01PM -0700
References:  <19980530054842.51661@follo.net> <17374.896500321@time.cdrom.com>

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On Fri, May 29, 1998 at 08:52:01PM -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> > > E.g. I can shoot my foot off, but I can't sew it back on. :-)
> > 
> > Yes, you can.  You can mount another devfs and 'mv' a device from it
> > (or at least that's the way the specs read - I don't have devfs
> > enabled right now, so I can't test).
> 
> That's utterly rude. :-)
> 
> I hope you're not implying that this is going to be the accepted way
> for doing this in the future as well.  Non-persistence is a big enough
> violation of POLA as it is, and not even being able to do mknod(2)
> operations on a devfs to replace missing entries would be a POLA
> catastrophe.

Allowing mknod on a devfs would be somewhat akin to pointing an Uzi at
your foot and playing with how close to the actual trig limit you can
pull the trigger without firing.

Remember, at least major numbers don't exist when DEVFS is fully
deployed.  For disks, minor numbers don't exist either.

Perhaps extend mknod to give a warning

	"you're attempting to do a 'mknod' on a devfs.  This is not
	possible.  However, you can achieve the effect you want by
	mounting another devfs and using 'mv' to transfer device
	nodes'

when somebody attempt to run it against a devfs?  I'm certain somebody
can write a paragraph in actual english that let a child of five
understand this (as compared to my pseudo-understandable technobabble
above).  We might run into a block in that very few children of five
are FreeBSD admins, though...

Eivind.

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