In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Bruce Evans writes:
>This could have been done without devfs by mapping names of special files >to numeric indexes in the kernel. Putting the index in the inode is mainly >an efficiency hack. Numeric indexes work quite well in the kernel (better >than pointers in the current implementation, since most drivers prefer to >work with numbers and call the inefficient replacements of the major() and >minor macros a lot). This is actually not true any more. An increasing number of drivers derive their softc pointer directly from the dev_t without the detour over compile-time-fixed-sized arrays of possible unit numbers. >> In the meantime, DEVFS is the best I could come up with which makes >> life simpler for users, developers and administrators, and still >> retains as many of the flaws as we want to keep. > >For me, it has saved about 10 minutes of admin time and cost a few >working weeks of development time so far. I don't think you are anywhere near the mean, or the median for that matter, of FreeBSD users. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
