Re: DevFS and "c00lness" (Re: Grub)
On Wed, 7 Nov 2001 22:31, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 02:42:03PM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
> > In normal operation you don't need to do "ls -l /usr/bin".
>
> Nor "ls -l /dev". What's your point?
Actually you often need to do "ls -l /dev" to see what devices exist and what
names they have been given (see the discussion on this thread regarding
moving /dev/input nodes to /dev). Then there's the issue of device nodes
disappearing and being replaced by files. How often have you seen a system
with no disk space and a huge file named /dev/st or similar? How about the
file /dev/nul that you get when DOS weenies are allowed access to the root
account? One of the benefits of devfs in this regard is that regular files
are not supported on /dev!
Running "ls -l /dev" is not something I need to do often on machines I own
and run, but most of the machines I work with are owned by other people who
do all sorts of strange things.
Then there's the issue of file system corruption. If you have atime enabled
then the old style /dev use results in regular updates to the inodes for /dev
which puts them at risk of corruption if something bad happens. I don't
recall seeing a device node missing from /dev after a fsck, but as there's a
few thousand I wouldn't notice unless it was a critical one.
--
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
Reply to: