Yes, it is very similar to kerneld/kmod. I think it wouldn't be a bad
idea to expand that mechanism to support this kind of stuff.
> I especially like the idea that modules still notify something there
> is a need for a /dev - so /dev remains dynamic, only shows you those
> devices which exist, etc - but very little exists in the kernel.
Even better -- the modules can actually store this information in an
additional ELF section (as we already do), and this stuff doesn't have
to go into the kernel at all.
> > This follows the fundamental principal of keeping policy out of the
> > kernel (an argument which you yourself have advanced), and doing as much
> > as possible in usermode. Performance won't be an issue, since if the
> > user-mode daemon is automatically creating the devices, you won't have
> > "8 million devices" in /dev (despite that favoriate devfs strawman
> > argument). True, lookups will still have to go through /dev, but the
> > dcache pretty much obviates that argument. (Also consider that opening
> > devices is generally in the noise as far as most applications are
> > concerned. It's hardly a common case that we need to optimize.)
>
> The only issue is that you then lose /dev on filesystems which don't
> support UNIX nodes (ie devfs on ms-dos partitions). Though there are
> other ways of achieving the same effect, so it's no big loss.
You can't have that anyway; devfs is the logical equivalent to
mounting a ramdisk (which can always do this), but for MS-DOS
filesystems in particular you have umsdos/uvfat, and I think this is
the correct solution.
-hpa
-- PGP: 2047/2A960705 BA 03 D3 2C 14 A8 A8 BD 1E DF FE 69 EE 35 BD 74 See http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/ for web page and full PGP public key I am Bahá'í -- ask me about it or see http://www.bahai.org/ "To love another person is to see the face of God." -- Les Misérables- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html