Followup to: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0205011555450.12640-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu>
By author: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> * it's _not_ a character device - stat() will give you S_IFREG.
> To check that <foo> is a new-style raw device call statfs(2) and
> compare .f_type with rawfs magic (0x726177). It doesn't conflict
> with existing check for raw devices (stat(), check that it's
> a character device and compare major with RAW_MAJOR), so existing
> software can be taught to check for raw devices in
> backwards-compatible way.
>
I really don't know if it's a good idea for this to be S_IFREG, which
software has a reasonable expecation to behave like a normal file,
which a raw device *definitely* doesn't.
I would really like things like this as well as a lot of the
zero-length magic files in /proc to be S_ISCHR with i_rdev ==
MK_DEV(0,0) (the latter to let user space know that this isn't a
standard device node.)
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt <amsp@zytor.com> - 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/
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