[ On Tuesday, April 2, 2002 at 11:16:11 (+0200), Jaromir Dolecek wrote: ]
> Subject: Is fdesc useful?
>
> what is the intended application of fdescfs? I've never used it on
> any machine and I don't seem to miss it so far.

I usually mount it for fun, and I used to use it instead of fd(4), but I
no longer do that because setting it up on every system takes too much
additional effort!  ;-)

> I'd prefer
> to just sack the thing, rather than continue supporting it.
> 
> Would anyone miss fdescfs if it would be gone?

I kinda like the idea of a special filesystem instead of a special
device driver....  Properly implemented it's more dynamic, adjusting
automatically to the number of open files in a given process rather than
having to have a fixed number of nodes created in /dev/fd, forcing the
system manager to either make assumptions about the number of files a
process might be able to open or to create a very large number of nodes.

It also seems much more elegant (and Plan-9-like!) than a pseudo driver....

There may be problems with it that I don't know about though.

However so long as at least one of fd(4) and fdesc exist I'll get by!  ;-)

(and of course if procfs were fixed to have a view of a process' open
files too then fdesc by itself would be rather redundant....)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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