Re: UUIDs (and devfs and major/minor numbers)

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 11:11:04 +0100 (BST)

> a devmgr without kernel interaction would be a complicated, gross hack.
> How would you handle dynamic devices with your devmgr? poll every second
> for new devices? and what do you poll? Your devmgr has to get the
> information about new/expired devices from somewhere - so the kernel has
> to export this information somewhere. Why not in the most logical way:
> directly to /dev?

This was Richard's argument. It is true you can do devfs in user space. It
is also true (as Richard pointed out) that the user space solution takes
about as much unswappable memory, and requires a pile of new kernel files
and also as I realised when I had a hack on this it needs select() and the
like on /proc files

You can do it in userspace, but once you are handling swap its on the wrong
side of ugly to do so.

What gets me is there are people saying khttpd is a good idea, when its
reporting lower performance than a user space httpd and who are anti-devfs

Alan

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