On 9/23/20 7:23 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
On Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 10:56 AM Rodney W. Grimes <free...@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>
wrote:
cp is already fixed, people are still feeling the fallout of being
within those revisions and needing to bootstrap their own cp. We can
reduce the number of components these invocations rely on trivially to
shell built-in mechanics, why not do so?
I would even go further, I would like to see the dependency on
/dev/null removed from the build, and the boot process.
A worthy goal, but one I'm afraid is out of our reach. A quick grep shows
just over 200 instances of /dev/null in the Makefile and mk file (800 if
you don't filter Makefile.in and Makefile.am). Maybe a third of those are
due to tests and other false positives. It would be quite the effort to
eliminate them all. And /dev/tty and /dev/zero likely will be troublesome
too, as they are used by running programs.
and how would you throw away output you know is bad / bogus without
/dev/null?
I wonder if we could do it (at least in some cases)
by closing descriptors with 1<&- and/or 2<&-.
From the build because it means I would no longer have to
mount /dev in my chroots, and from the boot because I
hate to say it, but we often scribble in /dev before
devfs is mounted and if you look at root file systems
mounted on other systems you well often find a /dev/null
FILE that got created during the boot process from a >/dev/null
before devfs was mounted.
But for this issue, we're not mounting devfs early enough. We should fix
that. Removing /dev/null from the boot process likely is never going to
happen because we use it all over the place to discard output... There's
~200 instances of it in the boot rc scripts, so getting rid of it there
would also be quite the effort, with the same question.
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