Dan Groves wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Cathy Zhou wrote:
>
>>> * 2.2: What are "phy_major" and "phy_minor" used for?
>>>
>> These are used to persist dev_t of a physical link. For example, a ce0
>> link, its major number would be "ce" and its minor would be 0, so that
>> when an application opens "ce0", or some driver calls mac_open("ce0"),
>> the kernel knows to hold the corresponding ce0 device, as the result,
>> "ce0" mac can be registered.
>>
>> But I am wondering whether it is correct to list all these
>> implementation details in the document.
>>
>> Thanks
>> - Cathy
>
> I disagree that the fields we store are implementation details. How we
> store things is an implementation detail, but what we store and where we
> store are not, in my mind. API users might want to query these fields,
> so they will need to know how to reference them and what they are.
>
I still think that the API should be more of get the name/value pair, and
both name and value should be transparent to the repository.
I don't feel comfortable to define them as part of the interface because
things like phy_major/phy_minor could change based on the implementation.
Thanks
- Cathy
