On Feb 21,  8:18pm, Frank van der Linden wrote:
}
} As you might have seen, I've been working on the thorpej-devvp branch
} that Jason started a while ago.
} 
} The reason for this change was that just passing a dev_t (a datatype
} that someday will hopefully go away altogether, but that's for
} another day) wasn't flexible enough for things like device cloning.
} Device cloning basically means that you get a private instance or
} 'clone' of the device once you have opened it. A good example
} of a device that can benefit from this is bpf; the number
} of bpf devices is now limited in the kernel config file, which
} is unneccesary. I will, in fact, make bpf a cloning device,
} it is trivial to do so.

     I doubt that most people need more then a few bpf devices.
However, I was wondering if cloning would apply to network devices,
such as ppp, which don't normally show up in /dev?  Also, I assume
cloning would apply to pty's, especially SysV style ones?

}-- End of excerpt from Frank van der Linden