Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 6 Aug 1998 00:12:57 +1000 | From | Richard Gooch <> | Subject | Re: DEVFSv50 and /dev/fb? (or /dev/fb/? ???) |
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Andrea Arcangeli writes: > On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, Richard Gooch wrote: > > >joke. Apart from being incredibly ugly (having a huge /dev), having > >lots of inodes means that directory searches are quite slow. > > 1. You can delete everything you don' t need from /dev/. If you are lazy > probably you also don' t care to tune a lot of other probably more > performance sensitive things in the kernel.
Yes, you can delete what you don't need. In fact I was doing that before I wrote devfs. But then when you buy a shiny new disc, you have to go and create inodes again. Using scsidev helps, but then there are still problems with inserting new devices on-the-fly and cute tricks like that. And you don't need exotic hardware to do this: think PCMCIA. Without devfs the problems just go on and on.
> 2. I don' t know very well the fs code but I don' t think the problem > is the number of inodes, but instead the number of file entry in the > directory /dev/. So dividing /dev/ in /dev/block /dev/char for example > would speed up things I think.
Yes, it helps a bit. But the problem just gets shifted to a subdirectory. If you have a fully populated directory of inodes for discs, that is still a big directory. Hence having *only* inodes for the devices you have currently plugged in is the way to go.
> I don' t know if devfs is so malleable/configurable.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean having subdirectories? Sure: devfs supports subdirectories. In fact a fair bit of stuff has the new name entries in subdirectories to reduce /dev clutter.
Regards,
Richard....
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