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

Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Sat, 19 Jun 1999 09:26:55 +1000

Horst von Brand writes:
> o.r.c@p.e.l.l.p.o.r.t.l.a.n.d.o.r.u.s (david parsons) said:
>
> [...]
>
> > Symlinks are your friend. If you can't live without the dubious
> > benefit of having the kernel not tell you information, but instead
> > have to guess about what devices are, you can do this with symlinks.
>
> Yet again: How do you manage permissions on this cleanly? It has to
> be persistent (no "OK, after we boot this tiny script fixes up the
> whole mess")? How do you propose to manage default permissions for
> devices that might suddenly appear out of nowhere (i.e., USB or
> hot-pluggable PCI or PCMCIA or...)? No, "one size fits all" won't
> do.

You actually haven't looked at devfsd, have you?

> I'm not against some devfs type scheme per se, but this is
> important, and devfs makes this problem _worse_ without solving much
> of the other problems that are there. The current way of populating
> /dev with everything there might ever be is broken, but gives you a
> clean, uniform way of setting persistent permissions using standard
> tools.

Actually, devfs makes it better. Devfs allows you to have a shared
NFS read-only root and still have a mutable /dev. And you can have
persistence too!

Regards,

Richard....

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