Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: UUIDs (and devfs and major/minor numbers) | Date | Mon, 21 Jun 1999 17:29:24 -0400 | From | "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <> |
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In message <Pine.LNX.4.05.9906210748380.11093-100000@mhw.ULib.IUPUI.Edu>, "Mark H. Wood" writes: +----- | > | devfs detractor either; at most I've asked people to consider whether a | > | filesystem hierarchy is really the most appropriate representation for th | e | > | various information that we all want. | > | > Why wouldn't it be? In its most generalized form, a filesystem is a | > hierarchical database used for kernel-to-userspace communication, which is | > why Plan 9 generalized it to namespaces and why there is e.g. /proc. It | | Besides, there's nothing that guarantees a filesystem *must* be | hierarchial. You could have tagging metadata and a QBE filespec syntax if | you really wanted to. (I can't yet imagine wanting to.) Hierarchy wasn't | inherent in the TOPS-10 filesystem, for example; it was grafted in later | because it is, after all, quite useful. Early MSDOS was the same way, I | believe. +--->8
But there is still a hierarchy, just under another name. "Show me all CDROM devices" defines a hierarchy based on device type. "Show me all SCSI devices" defines one based on the bus the device is on.
Unless you're suggesting that the enumerator generate all devices and let userspace cope with the result --- which seems needlessly expensive: a system call (whether it's sysctl() or read() wouldn't matter) per device, when searching for only a small subset of devices.
-- brandon s. allbery [os/2][linux][solaris][japh] allbery@kf8nh.apk.net system administrator [WAY too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu carnegie mellon / electrical and computer engineering KF8NH We are Linux. Resistance is an indication that you missed the point.
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