Horst von Brand <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl> wrote:
> This is wrong. I want my /home partition, or the tape with yesterday's
> backup. Sure, the way to get at them today is through a position (/home is
> /dev/hdb3, tape is /dev/st3), but this is not ideal at all. And if stuff
> starts moving around, any such scheme is hosed anyway. Can't go in and
> clamp the mouse to its USB port until the user (or whatever) reacts to the
> presence of the mouse _just there_.
This is a nice ideal, but until all devices have unique ids
(like ethernet's MAC addresses, or Fibre Channel's WWNs) it's
not practial at this point in time. Lookup by instance is where
I would put this information.
> And possibly multiple views (i.e., user chrooted or running DOSemu has to
> see floppy A, but not the other "floppy" (f.ex. tape) devices; has
> read-only access to the tape (get files from backup, don't overwrite),
> etc), no access (better even, no idea) of extant hard disks, ...
Chroot jails a good point. A wishful idea for devfs would
be per-user or per-group major number access lists for readdir()...
> [snip device configuration issues]
> A specialized API for this isn't a great burden if
> you look at it this way. Sure, could be more consistent, but the underlying
> reality just isn't. So this is _hard_.
When I said the configuration information should be in the filesystem,
I wasn't just talking about /proc or /devfs. A per-device configuration
tree in /etc would make me just as happy. Just put all hardware
configuration in one place.
-- Jason McMullan, Senior Linux Consultant, Linuxcare, Inc. 412.422.8077 tel, 412.656.3519 cell, 415.701.0792 fax jmcmullan@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/ Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 23 2000 - 21:00:22 EST