Re: PROPOSAL: /proc/dev

James Mastros (root@jennifer-unix.dyn.ml.org)
Sun, 4 Jan 1998 13:10:06 -0500 (EST)

On Sat, 3 Jan 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 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
[...]
> 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.
>
> Linus

This sounds very much like a job for a different day... I should think that
we want to have the ptys in /dev for now, supporting chmod/chown, just like
we did before. Then, once we get THAT working (if ever), we can worry about
rewriting the pty system.

-=- James Mastros

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