Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:11:46 +1100 (EST) From: Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org, remko@FreeBSD.org, yuri@tsoft.com, bug-followup@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: kern/120869: [procfs] 'stat' shows that all files have 0-length when they are actually not empty Message-ID: <20080221210145.C4879@besplex.bde.org> In-Reply-To: <20080221093203.Y52922@fledge.watson.org> References: <200802201208.m1KC8MHi009288@freefall.freebsd.org> <20080220132030.S14519@fledge.watson.org> <20080221202027.B29307@delplex.bde.org> <20080221093203.Y52922@fledge.watson.org>
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On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Robert Watson wrote: > On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Bruce Evans wrote: >>> [about files in procfs] >> The bug is mainly that stat() claims that the files are regular when they >> highly irregular (they are more like fifos). This confuses naive >> applications into thinking that normal access methods for regular files >> actually work. > > I feel this way more generally about synthetic file systems with objects in > them that don't correspond with any of the standard file system objects that > applications known how to deal with. Enough to break compatibility/portabiility by adding a new file type? :-) S_IFMT has 4 bits, so it could encode 16 file types, but it currently only encodes 8. It looks like it once had only 3 bits but was expanded for fifos. It was last changed in ~1993 in 4.4BSD to add whiteouts. Bruce
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