Re: PROPOSAL: /proc/dev

Dan Hollis (goemon@sasami.anime.net)
Wed, 31 Dec 1997 23:04:49 -0800 (PST)

On Thu, 1 Jan 1998, Richard Gooch wrote:
> The question of symlinks: either the devfs supports creation of
> symlinks (stored in RAM) or you require symlinks from an external
> filesystem (not very nice).

I favor the former, since either way you're going to eat disk space for
storage of symlinks - either in a script or on the disk. But with a ram
based symlink, you don't have to hit the disk to dereference the link,
so its faster. It's also one less failure point for a system due to
filesystem corruption, and one less thing for fsck to handle.

Someone's already specced out a linuxfs at

http://www.cs.uml.edu/~acahalan/linux/devfs.html

Someone's already written code :-) at

http://www.linuxhq.com/patch/20-p0814.html

-Dan