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SubjectRe: UUIDs (and devfs and major/minor numbers)
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hi,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>This isn't a direct reply to anyone; just getting a
thought out there.&nbsp; It seems like most of the objection to devfs has been
to its use of bus locations rather than logical identifications of a disk in
locating them.&nbsp; But is it really any more difficult to build a logical
volume view of the disks in a system on top of devfs than it is to do the same
on top of a physical dev filesystem?&nbsp; Actually, I would think it's easier,
since programs like LILO just have to check devices that are actually present
for that UUID.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I think the ultimate hypocrisy (sp?) in this
discussion is that a lot of people are saying that policy should be kept out of
the kernel, but then criticizing devfs for not handling policy.&nbsp; UUID's,
volume labels, and so forth are definitely policy.&nbsp; They can be handled in
user space, and in some cases, despite a static dev filesystem being a poor
abstraction to build on top of, applications do handle them at user-level.&nbsp;
Names in the dev filesystem are NOT policy.&nbsp; They have just been used that
way because any appropriate policy does not exist.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>So how about we stop criticizing devfs for what it
doesn't do, and instead start thinking about how it improves what we have right
now.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Chris Smith</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>PS. Maybe I missed this in the Union FS discussion,
but has anyone thought about the implications of unionfs in solving some of the
remaining hacks in devfs?&nbsp; Take, for example, required sockets for
init.&nbsp;&nbsp;Just a thought for the future.&nbsp; (Although from a purist
perspective, which I admit to occasionally holding, I'd say we probably ought to
start changing init programs to not use sockets in /dev -- that seems like a
poor place for such a socket)</FONT></DIV>
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