Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 15 May 2001 14:27:10 -0700 | From | "Timothy A. Seufert" <> | Subject | Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants |
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Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 15 May 2001, Alexander Viro wrote: >> Driver can export a tree and we mount it on fb0. After that you have >> the whole set - yes, /dev/fb0/colourspace, etc. - no problem. And no >> need to do mknod, BTW. Yes, we'll need to use /dev/fb0/frame for >> frame itself. BFD... > >Actually, we can just continue to use "/dev/fb0", which would continue to >work the way ti has always worked. > >It's a mistake to think that a directory has to be a directory. Or to >think that a device node has to be a device node. It's perfectly ok to >just think of it as namespaces. So opening /dev/fb0 continues to open the >"master fd", whatever that means (in this case, the actual frame >buffer). The namespaces _under_ /dev/fb0 would be the control channels, or >in fact _anything_ that the frame buffer driver wants to expose.
Why not take it a step further than just devices? This is a perfect model for supporting named forks.
In fact, I believe this is how MacOS X is exposing HFS+ named forks to the UNIX side of things. (HFS+ supports not just the old style Macintosh data and resource forks but an arbitrary number of named forks.) So: you open "foo", you get what an older MacOS would consider the "data" fork. Open "foo/rsrc" and you get the resource fork. Open "foo/joesfork" and you get whatever Joe wanted to use a named fork for. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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