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Date:      Wed, 3 Mar 1999 23:57:03 -0800 (PST)
From:      Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
To:        Shawn Leas <sleas@ixion.honeywell.com>
Cc:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Device FS?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9903032342540.310-100000@s204m82.isp.whistle.com>
In-Reply-To: <19990304011308.A12664@ixion.honeywell.com>

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FreeBSD has had a devfs that is not genrally useful for over 2 years.
The code to make it useful was removed from the tree due to various
reasons that can be argued ither way. I haven't had the inspiration to
re-write it as it needs to be changed to take into account some new
developments in FreeBSD (e.g. CAM based SCSI)

The DEVFS on FreeBSD is bot similar and different from the
DEVFS im linux in htat the LINUX devfs can have devices in the DEVFS that
are not physically present, in order to preserve the ownership information
(It's not persistant across reboot, bot one can do a mknod, to create a
device, and assign it ownerships and permissions, in th ehope that at some
time on the future, a device of that name will turn up.

The FreeBSD DEVFS only  creates a node in /dev when the associated
hardware is actually found, and hte node is not permitted to exist in any
other case.

Even though I wrrote DEVFS I see a severe limitiation to its usefulness
due to a number of factors (including the fact that some people have
hundreds of dev directories in hundreds of chroot trees).

THese are surmountable, but I have a different idea I'm ruminating on that
might make a DEVFS look a bit old-fashionned.




On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Shawn Leas wrote:

> I heard (or thought so) a long time ago that FreeBSD
> had a devfs like filesystem.

yes it does.. the original..

> 
> Now I remember, here's where I found it mentioned in
> respect to FreeBeasty...
> http://www.cs.uml.edu/~acahalan/linux/devfs.html
> 
> Is this still experimental? Oh, and has anyone heard
> of any LFS projects on freebsd, and/or maybe LVM?
>
LFS suffered a severe disilussionment problem when it was found that it 
didn't seem to give the promised performance. It's present;y not in the
tree (only in the CVS attic) because no-one wanted to work on it any more.

We have a LVM called vinum  ("vinum veritas" being the latin quote)

> I'm trying to think of reasons to switch over from
> Linux 2.2.2-ac7-lvm0.6-devfs to -current, or maybe
> stable, depending on what I feel like...

if you've got a few hundred MB free, give 3.1 a try (I mean... It's free)


> 
> -- Shawn 
> <=========== America Held Hostage ===========>
>    Day 2233 for the poor and the middle class. 
>    Day 2252 for the rich and the dead.
>    689 days remaining in the Raw Deal.
> <============================================> 
> 
> 
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