On Wed, 9 Jun 1999 11:03:27 +0200, Gabor Lenart
<lgb@oxygene.terra.vein.hu> said:
> Is there any patch or plan to implement network char. device like nbd
> for block devices ?
Supporting networked character devices is hopelessly complex. Some char
devices have strange mmap() requirements that you just cannot do over
the network. All of them have ioctl()s, in which the ioctl handler in
the driver pokes around in user memory in unpredictable patterns: there
is no certain way to tell whether the accesses will be reads or writes,
and how much memory is touched. Marshalling all of that over the
network wouldd be a nightmare: you would have to special-case just about
every ioctl, and the mmap() stuff will never work (think about /dev/mem
framebuffers for an example).
--Stephen
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