Messages in this thread | | | From | Andries.Brouwer@cwi ... | Date | Fri, 22 Nov 2002 02:34:35 +0100 (MET) | Subject | Re: [PATCH] kill i_dev |
| |
From torvalds@transmeta.com Fri Nov 22 00:57:03 2002
> There is a single side effect: a stat on a socket now sees > a nonzero st_dev. There is nothing against that - FreeBSD > has a nonzero value as well - but there is at least one > utility (fuser) that will need an update.
Looking at the patch (not testing it), as far as I can tell we'll return a basically random number that is just whatever the anonymous super-block was allocated, right?
Right.
I'm not convinced that returning random numbers to user space is necessarily a great idea.. That said, I think we already do it for unnamed pipes anyway, so I'm more wondering if we should have some way to map these numbers (in user space) to a valid thing, so that they wouldn't just be random numbers.
I don't know. We can try in-kernel to give these well-known services well-known numbers. Or we can give them essentially random numbers like today but publish these somewhere, e.g. under /sys. Both are easy, but seem too heavy for a value used by nobody. We have process IDs and anonymous fs IDs, and both are just what they happen to be.
Andries
[If userspace wants to know the present value, then create a socket, stat, 3! Create a pipe, stat, 7!] - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |