Re: Locking of serial devices and devfs

[Cyrille Chepelov <chepelov@calixo.net>]

Le jeu, jun 21, 2001, à 03:40:13 +0200, Wichert Akkerman a écrit:
> Previously Cyrille Chepelov wrote:
> > devfs is all about loosing that major/minor <troll>nonsense</troll>.
> 
> No it's not. It's about changing the way they are handled.

Please grep for "Note that devfs doesn't use the major&minor system" in
linux/Documentation/filesystems/devfs/README. Devfs exposes a major/minor
view, so that legacy applications which depend on that scheme don't break
(or don't break too miserably), but IIRC, one of the goals of devfs is to
show the feasibility of getting rid of this (after all, you've already got
the namespace in general and the device node's dentry in particular to contact
the device driver ; why add and maintain a separate, parallel scheme ?).

I have yet to see a rational explanation for device numbers in the days of
virtual file systems and semi-unified namespaces (except ones which finish
their sentences by "Period!")

	-- Cyrille

-- 
Grumpf.