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

CaT (cat@zip.com.au)
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 13:20:41 +1000

On Thu, Jun 17, 1999 at 05:47:15PM -0400, Horst von Brand wrote:
> DAVID BALAZIC <david.balazic@uni-mb.si> said:
> > > Like it or not, syscall numbers *are* policy, and the kernel should
> > > not be
> > > dictating policy. Therefore. the kernel should not be deciding what
> > > numbers are assigned to syscalls. Q.E.D.
>
> syscall numbers are just arbitrary descriptors, on which the kernel and
> libc have to agree. That is all. No policy involved. If you say "Thou
> shallst not use syscall <insert favorite syscall number here> unless thou
> art root" _that_ is policy. Set by POSIX, in this case, _not_ the kernel.

I could be wrong here but this is a direct analog of devfs as far as I
can see. 'device' (note the quotes. I'm not being that exact here :)
names are just arbitary descriptors much like syscall numbers. What they
are is what got decided on. According to the above that's not policy.

Now access to what they represent would be and AFAIK this is handled
by devfsd (or it can be - not too sure of of its present state). It'll
set the permissions of the files and as such that's all in user space.

whee..

(here's hoping that everyone didn't say that in the 2-300 msgs above ;)

-- 
CaT (cat@zip.com.au)                    URL: http://zipper.zip.com.au/dev/null




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