Subject: Re: Is fdesc useful?
To: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
From: Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 04/02/2002 10:07:26
On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, der Mouse wrote:

: > Would anyone miss fdescfs if it [were] gone?
:
: I would, for what that may be worth.  I consider it a significantly
: more elegant way to support /dev/fd than tons of special devices,

We don't yet have some real concept of a fully dynamic /dev (for all the
plethora of reasons we've mentioned before), but fdescfs is an important
step towards that.

: And aesthetically, I've never liked the kludge of a special device driver
: whose open routine arranges to provoke hacks in high kernel to do dups
: instead.

Unavoidable with the current arrangement, but some proposals for dynamic
/dev have provided possibilities that this could be elided into the higher
level kernel code rather than the low level device drivers.  (Similar logic
is needed for a ptmx PTY multiplexer device.)

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi & NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- CDs, Integration, Embedding, Support -- http://www.wasabisystems.com/