Re: Relayfs question

From: Jan Engelhardt
Date: Sat Mar 19 2005 - 14:18:48 EST


Hi,

>[...]
> The current method is to just manage buffers and enable applications to mmap
> the buffers to read them with some signalling on when a buffer is to be read
> and when the kernel can overwrite it.
>
> A character device is unlikely to need such interface since you do want 16
> bytes of random data and not several pages of mapped random numbers. If you
> really need a lot of random numbers you need something in user-space anyway
> since you'll deplete the kernel entropy pool pretty fast anyway.
>
> If you have a device that needs to transfer lots of data doesn't mind it being
> batched and doesn't really need the character device interface then relayfs
> could be useful.

Ok, urandom was a bad example. I have my tty logger (ttyrpld.sf.net) which
moves a lot of data (depends) to userspace. It uses a ring buffer of "fixed"
size (set at module load time). Apart from that relayfs could use a dynamic
sized ring buffer, I would not see any need to move it to relayfs, would you?



Jan Engelhardt
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