Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Bigger "dev_t"s
Message-ID: <442@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 12 Nov 88 05:52:30 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: 14

(Continued from previous rock)  Some people at Sun have suggested the
same idea, with "specfs" becoming not just a class of vnodes but a
"real" mountable file system.  Bill Shannon suggested making "/dev/fd" a
file system; this has the advantages that

	1) you might not have to whack up the VFS kernel's "open" code
	   to pass an extra argument to device drivers (as in Arnold
	   Robbins' "/dev/fd" driver);

	2) you would't have to create or destroy entries based on the
	   maximum number of file descriptors per process supported by
	   your kernel.  (You could even get *truly* perverse and have it
	   look different in different processes, so that it reflects
	   the number of *open* file descriptors....)