Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Bigger "dev_t"s
Message-ID: <441@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 12 Nov 88 05:45:13 GMT
References: <156@gloom.UUCP> <6865@winchester.mips.COM> <468@oracle.UUCP> <1988Oct31.183021.13880@utzoo.uucp> <1023@murtoa.cs.mu.oz.au> <8834@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 18

>Better yet, have /dev be a special file system of its own (using the
>file system switch) that takes care of the details of mapping strings
>to driver entries.

One nuisance with this would be that, unless the contents of this file
system were somehow recorded (completely or partially) in some form of
non-volatile storage, you'd have to stick bunches of "chown" commands in
some place such as "/etc/rc" in order to be able to administer
permissions on files.  The simplest implementation of such a file system
would give all "/dev" files the same permissions, and that would either
be too restrictive or too permissive a default; fancier implementations
would quite likely put policy code into the kernel, which I would oppose
both for philosophical and practical reasons.

I don't have any great problem with the "chown"s being stuck in
"/etc/rc" (the moral equivalent of those "chown"s are in "/dev/MAKEDEV"
on BSD systems and systems that have adopted MAKEDEV from BSD, for
example), but it may be a minor inconvenience to have to stick them there.