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SubjectRe: UUIDs (and devfs and major/minor numbers)
On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Dan Hollis wrote:
> > If you start playing around with device names, expect severe application
> > breakage.
> > Or maybe you have some interesting justification to start renaming
> > /dev/tty* into other things?
> > Or lets rename /dev/null on a whim and see how useful that is.
> You totally don't get it, do you? First of all, there is the
> permissions issue.

Devfs works with permissions.

> Second of all, say I have a device called, say /dev/keyboard. Now I
> want to simulate keyboard input with a user-space process, or redirect
> the keyboard input from say, a serial port. That's what a level of
> indirection is for.

Devfs also works with symlinks.

Device names might not be hardcoded in the kernel, but they are more or
less hardcoded by conventional usage by end user applications. May not be
proper but thats simply the way it is.

So I will re-iterate since you didnt get it the first time.

Being able to arbitrarily change device names as "justification" for
keeping the current /dev and rejecting devfs, is not as important or as
useful as you make it out to be because:

1) you can also symlink devfs.
2) devfs still has permissions.

-Dan


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