On 10/26/05, Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
> In message <F1E1A773-FE03-4E20-906D-601FC522D750@shagadelic.org>, Jason T=
horpe
> writes:
>
> >
> >FWIW, I think a devfs based on our new tmpfs would be better for NetBSD.
> >
>
> I was under the impression that each i-node in tmpfs consumed a fair
> amount of space, making it a bad match for things like /dev which have
> very many i-nodes but no actual files.  (Well, I've seen glitches on
> ancient systems where /dev/null got turned into a regular file, leading
> to amusing messages about "/dev/null: no space left on device"...)

They are bigger than on-disk nodes, but not so much.  You can ceratinly kee=
p
a bunch of them in memory, specially considering that a devfs doesn't have
a lot of nodes; you'll only have those that you really need.

--
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>
The Julipedia - http://julipedia.blogspot.com/
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/