Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 7 Oct 1999 19:55:19 -0400 (EDT) | From | Stephen Frost <> | Subject | Re: devfs again, (was RE: USB device allocation) |
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On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Horst von Brand wrote:
> This is _horrible_. Suddenly there are files whose attributes aren't fixed > by chmod(1)/chown(1), but by a magic file. > > Again. The way Unix is designed, permanent information about files resides > in the filesystem. Another basic Unix design premise is that devices are > files. So their attributes reside in the filesystem. Anything else breaks > much ("tar cf dev.tar /dev", ..., "tar xf dev.tar /dev" doesn't work > anymore (but it looks like it does!); can't dump/restore /dev; ...). It > might also have _very_ serious security implications (what if the magic > devfs.conf file goes missing, or is clobbered?)
Agreed, this can be a problem, hence my thoughts on a set of /dev files that reside on the filesystem pointing to /devices, which can be thought of as basically the same thing as major,minor pairs, w/ the exception that they are names (And as such much more scalable, and often easier to understand). Unfortunately, I don't know enough about how devices work to know if something like this is even possible. I suppose you could take away /devices and change whatever you have to to make major,minor pairs names instead... Then have a userspace daemon that can do what it wants to the files, or they can be modified by hand. Of course, this looses us the (debated) advantage of having /dev being in memory instead of on disk. Then I ask you, how can a script find out specific information about what hardware exists on the system? Run through everything in /dev? If /dev is fully populated, this could take a while... /proc gives us some data currently, though it's not in a very standard fashion, and currently would be hard for a script or program to parse out. Curious, what are your feelings on /proc, anyhow?
Stephen
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