/dev translator

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 10:20:27AM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
  Someone wrote:
> > Have you thought about writing a translator for /dev itself, rather than
> > using a script to populate a directory? devfs the Hurd way.
> 
> Certainly we have.  I think this is ultimately the Right Thing, in
> fact.

I've just wondered myself about it, but I am not sure how this would be done
best.  The good thing about having one node per device file is that you can
set permissions and ownership etc for each node seperately, persistent
across reboots.  I would not want to miss that.

So, what you do is you have a special translator on /dev.  What does it do?
Does it provide a virtual filesystem hierarchy, a bit like the mux
filesystems do, or would it be more like fakeroot translator, passing most
accesses through, but catching lookups of non-existing nodes, and creating
missing device files on the fly?

The former would have to store the file metadata elsewhere.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de