From torvalds@transmeta.com Fri Nov 22 00:57:03 2002
> There is a single side effect: a stat on a socket now sees
> a nonzero st_dev. There is nothing against that - FreeBSD
> has a nonzero value as well - but there is at least one
> utility (fuser) that will need an update.
Looking at the patch (not testing it), as far as I can tell we'll return a
basically random number that is just whatever the anonymous super-block
was allocated, right?
Right.
I'm not convinced that returning random numbers to user space is
necessarily a great idea.. That said, I think we already do it for unnamed
pipes anyway, so I'm more wondering if we should have some way to map
these numbers (in user space) to a valid thing, so that they wouldn't just
be random numbers.
I don't know. We can try in-kernel to give these well-known services
well-known numbers. Or we can give them essentially random
numbers like today but publish these somewhere, e.g. under /sys.
Both are easy, but seem too heavy for a value used by nobody.
We have process IDs and anonymous fs IDs, and both are just what
they happen to be.
Andries
[If userspace wants to know the present value, then create a socket,
stat, 3! Create a pipe, stat, 7!]
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Nov 23 2002 - 22:00:39 EST