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SubjectRe: DEVFSv50 and /dev/fb? (or /dev/fb/? ???)
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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