Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 16 May 2001 09:55:59 -0700 (PDT) | From | James Simmons <> | Subject | Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants |
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> > At this point of the discussion I would like to point to the Device Registry > > patch (http://www.tjansen.de/devreg) that already solves these problems and > > offers stable device ids for the identification of devices and finding their > > /dev nodes. > > Does your approach solve the problem of USB devices, like mice, that > don't have device ID's of any sort, where topology is the only way to > distinguish them? IIRC, the USB development team was planning to use > topology to provide a limited ability to associate a mouse on a given > port with a display, when XFree86 supports per-Xinerama-display input > device associations. > They new VT console work would benefit from this, too.
I have been thinking about this. If you think about it multi-desktop systems are very similar to clustering. The idea is something can only be seen by certain things in the system. With clustering you might want a shared memeory segment (/dev/shm) visble to certain NUMA nodes. With multi-desktop systems you have several users using the same box. Now you don't want to user 3 being able to draw something to users 2 screen. So how do you handle this? Since we are treating the device as a filesystem we can control the permissons on all the files in the filesystem. This gives the extra bonus of the ability to make certain device features global to certain groups. The best way I can see it is to setup workstation groups. This is pretty easy to do with most systems since most have a group per user. So for desktop one you have it belong to user joe. So when he want to some device on his machine he mounts the filesystem and all the files and directories belong to joe. No one else can use that device. Now what if you want several people to be able to use the same desktop. The sys admin could create a desktop1 group and then ensure the device is mounted with the desktop1 group. Then anyone belonging to the desktop group can access this hardware. The extra bonus is the ability to allow certain feature of a device to be exposed to same someone in your group. This could be a really powerful feature. Unfortunely I can't think of a example off the top of my head.
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