Re: PROPOSAL: /proc/dev

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sat, 3 Jan 1998 20:19:27 -0800 (PST)

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.

Linus