My personal feeling is that this would be gross. First it gives special
meaning to the string "/dev/tcp"... what about "/dev//tcp" or
"../../../dev/tcp" or a symlink pointing to "/dev/tcp". True, it's unlikely
that you'll encounter a program screwed up enough to want to do that, but
it's possible. The ioctl hack has a similar properties - the file
descriptor now has a "magical" property that isn't preserved across a
dup, exec, or being passed through a socket (although the dup case could
be worked around using yet-more syscall kludging). Maybe this doesn't matter
but I think its a hack.
I think what's being proposed here (a couple basic devices whose only
function is a simple ioctl) is laughably trivial in the kernel. It's about
as complicated as /dev/null. We have the framework (drivers/char/misc.c).
They could even be a module (although I think they would waste most of
their 1 page of memory) Having it in the kernel would at least make the
device behave somewhat rationally.
> I'm not advocating any approach here,
Me neither. I'm not sure this whole STREAMS business is worth doing.
There's a couple things that I like about STREAMS but they almost all
would require a full-blown implementation (which is almost certainly a
BAD idea)
-Mitch
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