Messages in this thread | | | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] alternative API for raw devices | Date | 1 May 2002 15:52:25 -0700 |
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Followup to: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0205011555450.12640-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu> By author: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu> In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > * it's _not_ a character device - stat() will give you S_IFREG. > To check that <foo> is a new-style raw device call statfs(2) and > compare .f_type with rawfs magic (0x726177). It doesn't conflict > with existing check for raw devices (stat(), check that it's > a character device and compare major with RAW_MAJOR), so existing > software can be taught to check for raw devices in > backwards-compatible way. >
I really don't know if it's a good idea for this to be S_IFREG, which software has a reasonable expecation to behave like a normal file, which a raw device *definitely* doesn't.
I would really like things like this as well as a lot of the zero-length magic files in /proc to be S_ISCHR with i_rdev == MK_DEV(0,0) (the latter to let user space know that this isn't a standard device node.)
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