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From: veit@fanoe.gmd.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Re: Some ideas on the driver interface (was: Re: Release of drivers etc.)
Message-ID: <1993Mar3.104035.13082@gmd.de>
Sender: veit@fanoe (Holger Veit)
Nntp-Posting-Host: fanoe
Organization: GMD - German National Research Center for Computer Science
References: <CGD.93Feb24023053@gaia.CS.Berkeley.EDU> <1993Feb24.130019.9933@gmd.de> <C32vAt.3t9.1@cs.cmu.edu> <C3AL86.Kt5@cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1993 10:40:35 GMT
Lines: 35
In article <C3AL86.Kt5@cs.mcgill.ca>, storm@cs.mcgill.ca (Marc Wandschneider) writes:
|> In article <C32vAt.3t9.1@cs.cmu.edu> cmaeda+@cs.cmu.edu (Christopher Maeda) writes:
|> >
|> >It seems like the real solution is do away with this "/dev/xxx" brain
|> >damage entirely. Why use the file system to replicate state that the
|> >kernel is perfectly capable of managing by itself???
|>
|> I've always considered this to be one of the neater things about
|> UNIX. Everything, to some degree, can be represented as a file, and you
|> don't have to have the same complete isolation from the hardware as one has
|> under say DOS or Windows...
|>
|> I don't know much about how practical this is, but it's certainly
|> rather nice to be able to just cat something to /dev/tty?? and things like
|> that....
This was not the content of Christopher's remark, I believe. Noone wants to
remove special files at all; so you will still be able to cat something to
/dev/tty and wonder where it goes to. The question is whether to provide
special "files" (say inodes with special attributes set) by the user
(by creating it via mknod) or by the system itself (which "knows" about the
drivers in it), and represent this information about the devices in a
"device file system".
Holger
|> storm@cs.mcgill.ca McGill P.O.W Camp "Oh crap---It's not
--
Dr. Holger Veit | INTERNET: Holger.Veit@gmd.de
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