Rich McAllister wrote:
> This does raise the question of what to do about things that read
> /var/sadm/install/contents today.
> ...
> Several
> ideas have come to mind:
>
> ....
> - Write a special file system that mounts on /var/sadm/install/contents
> and does the cat on the fly. Makes the change very invisible, but
> it's really a lot of work and gadgetry to preserve an interface that
> was never documented for use.
What we're actually thinking about here is a daemon that emulates the
/var/sadm/install/contents file; the first time the file would be read
after a pkg{add,rm} a new global contents file would be constructed
from all the per-package contents files. After that, the cached
global version would be used until another pkg cmd was used.
The mechanism to do this doesn't exist yet, but it's under active
discussion. The simplest idea is the ability to have a daemon
respond to open/stat commands on the file; it would return a
fd to the kernel which could be used for either operation....
- Bart
Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance
barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
