Re: DEVFSv50 and /dev/fb? (or /dev/fb/? ???)

Albert D. Cahalan (acahalan@cs.uml.edu)
Thu, 6 Aug 1998 14:10:04 -0400 (EDT)

Andrea Arcangeli writes:
> On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, Shawn Leas wrote:
>
>> In saying waiting, I wasn't meaning the human style foot tapping, coffee
>> getting, *long wait* that it might have sounded like. I meant that little
>> bit of time spent is unnecessary. Bigger deal for some than others, no?
>
> You really don' t understand that the inode lookup time is not an issue.
> Please really stop using it as and argument in favor of devfs.

No, you don't understand. It has nothing to do with "ls /dev".

Many programs need to search through /dev. That includes lilo, the
whole procps package, stuff related to the talk daemon, etc.

That's not even the worst of it. Every time you open a pty, you need
access /dev. Every time you want /dev/null or /dev/zero, you access /dev.

The result: general system slowdown. You can't point a finger at
the problem ("we lost 23 seconds RIGHT THERE because /dev was slow")
but you suffer anyway.

Hey, Linus! It looks like a latency problem.

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