>Does "/dev/printer/0" exist without the lp module being loaded?
No.
>If no, you must go outside normal filesystem semantics and talk to a
>_non-existent_ inode as if it exists.
It isn't non-existent, think of it as if you are asking the
device (which in this case is the devfs namespace) whether
there is an inode for a file named "0" in ./printer. devfs
knows that part of the tree is managed by module "printer",
which is an alias for whatever module to load. After trying
to load the module, either the node is there or isn't.
It seems you take issue with ANY dynamic FS.
>Drivers which are not explicitly hot-plug need some sort of "kick"
>before the kernel knows it needs to load a module/driver. Having that
>kick come in the form of open(), or worse stat(), is the part I don't
>like. Creating a file implicitly like that just seems alien to the
>traditional Unix fs.
It is unlike traditional Unix fses, but is that really that bad?
-Shawn
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