Re: PROPOSAL: /proc/dev

Kevin Lentin (kevinl@cs.monash.edu.au)
Tue, 6 Jan 1998 19:32:35 +1100

On Mon, Jan 05, 1998 at 12:22:15PM -0600, Michael Elizabeth Chastain wrote:
> One feature of devfs is that it gets rid of major and minor numbers.
> In some other way, /dev/foo gets associated with the foo driver.
>
> Hmmm, perhaps this advantage could be separated out and made to work
> with the existing system. A new major number of "auto-resolve" would
> cause the kernel to resolve the filename to a device driver. I don't
> know if this is a feasible idea or not.

One side effect of all this is that /dev/cdrom will _have_ to be a symlink
now. Device naming policy is now a kernel issue and no longer an admin
issue.

A second point. More a question. Under the new devfs scheme can I put
devices in other parts of the filesystem? If there are no major/minor
numbers, can I create a device file called 'core' that is really /dev/null
(without using a symlink)? Sure, symlinks work almost all of the time but
there are cases where you might want a device somewhere else.

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