Re: PROPOSAL: /proc/dev

Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU)
Mon, 5 Jan 1998 12:09:54 +1100

Linus Torvalds writes:
>
>
> On Sun, 4 Jan 1998, Richard Gooch wrote:
> > Linus Torvalds writes:
> >
> > > Btw, devfs should probably think long and hard about pty's...
> >
> > I don't know what you had in mind here. There is the issue of
> > registering all these /dev entries, but it should be easy enough to
> > come up with an interface which doesn't require a driver to call
> > dev_register() a zillion times (i.e. code in devfs effectively does
> > the individual registrations).
>
> What I was thinking about was to maybe skip the notion that all pty's are
> available in /dev at all, and take the plunge to a real "open_pty()"
> functionality (I don't remember the name of the interface that allocates a
> new master pty - but we can certainly avoid the horror of walking through
> all pty's one at a time until we find a non-busy one). Our current
> pty-opening strategy is the original (fairly broken) BSD one, and just
> about everybody else has moved on to another way of finding a pty to open.
>
> Having zillions of pty's in devfs is not something I'd like to see.

I agree, it's a pretty silly arrangement. However, it's kind of a
separate issue. My main drive at the moment is to create the devfs
infrastructure. You can still create a tty_open() interface, with or
without devfs.

Regards,

Richard....