Hi,
I've thought a bit about some ideas to replaced devfs with a combination
of automount and many small virtual filesystems. The idea is the following:
- a automount module (attached), that mounts the fs by the name of the subdir
it will be mounted on, so with a /etc/auto.device that contains
the following line:
-------------------- snip -------------------
* -fstype=devfs :none
-------------------- snip -------------------
a lookup on /device/tts will mount the 'tts' file system on /devices/tts
(/devices should be /dev once we get union-mounts)
- every driver has a built-in file system that has the name of the /dev subdir.
- these file systems log every lookup/chmod/etc to a chardev (e.g. /dev/devfsd)
- all device that must not be on this virtual file systems (/dev/console,
(dev/devfsd, a to be implemeted /dev/root, ...) are normal nodes in /dev
(once we get union-mounts ...).
I'am just now playing iwith such a virtual filesytem for the serial driver that is
based on devpts, but devpts seems not the best solution to me, because
- it has it's own infrastructure (to much overhead)
- it needs to handle multiple mounts specially
- the device node can only be registerd after the file system has been mounted
a least one time.
I'd like to use Linus' ramfs as base, but I've not figured out, how to create files
with pathnames relative to the mountpoint ...
Christoph
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 23 2000 - 21:00:10 EST