Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 00:27:52 -0400 (EDT) From: Simon Shapiro <shimon@simon-shapiro.org> To: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.ORG>, Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> Subject: Re: Heads up: block devices to disappear! Message-ID: <XFMail.980624002752.shimon@simon-shapiro.org> In-Reply-To: <199806232113.FAA08470@spinner.netplex.com.au>
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On 23-Jun-98 Peter Wemm wrote: ... some excellent explanations deleted ... I still fail to see why these have to be removed, changed or modified in any way. The savings in kernel size are minimal. The block device being a ``subset'' of the char device is one view. Another view is that the character device is an extention to the block device. They are fundamentally different creatures. While I have rarely used the block device for anything but mounting filesystems, I have used them more than once, when needing to do high speed I/O to a partition, while still wanting the kernel to buffer the I/O, as in userspace filesystems, storage managers for databases, and toehr such creatures. I'd suggest we leave these alone. They hurt no one and come handly at times. The contortions needed to implement block devices on top of character devices without having block devices are hardly worth the fuss. Simon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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