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From: jason@violet.Berkeley.EDU (Jason Venner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Large machines and tty naming conventions.
Message-ID: <8550@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 29-Jul-87 12:07:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.8550
Posted: Wed Jul 29 12:07:32 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 31-Jul-87 04:42:45 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 48


As we get larger and larger machines, the naming conventions for tty's
and ptys are getting pushed beyond their design specs.  We have a
couple of machines here that need more than 256 pty's, and more than
100 tty's.

At this point, every program that grabs a pty, has a pty grabbing
routine hard coded in, they usually stop after q, or r.  If you are a
binary only site (or run ultrix) you're %^&*ed.

It is time to rethink the naming conventions for devices.

For one, /dev is getting ridiculously large, and open times are growing.
On BSD:
The major & minor number needs to be changed, 8 bits for each is not enough.

-------------

Changing the declaration of dev_t to an unsigned long from a short,
and modifying major() & minor() in types.h, and deleting some of the
fill space in the stat structure (stat.h) would allow for more
major/minor devices without complicating life too much

making directorys in /dev and putting files in there would solve
several problems:
	ie:
		/dev/pty/....
		/dev/ttyp/...
		/dev/ra/...
		/dev/rra/...

1: it would speed up accesses through /dev
2: pty numbers could just be a numerical sequence in the directory
	ie: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
	In this manner, you just access up until you miss a number
	to get all the ptys, no hard coded pty 







Jason Venner
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