7 Feb
2018
7 Feb
'18
11:39 a.m.
On Tue, 6 Feb 2018, Bakul Shah wrote:
[...]
Umm, I've known that since Edition 5; I'm not exactly new to Unix, you
know...
[...]
Wasn't
that "devfs" (which Penguin/OS calls "udev")? I've never
grokked that concept.
In the old days where a limited types of devices were
available for a particular kind of machine, they could be
statically assigned a major dev number (matching their index
in the {b,c}devsw table). To make them accessible to users you
did
mknod <name> <b or c> <major> <minor> So the point of devfs is to avoid having to do mknod
manually and yet
provide access to all found devices from the userland. As a side effect
you can also use it for programs that run in their own sandbox or for
jails and require access to a device.
That makes sense; bit of a pain when a USB device suddenly disappears just
I unplugged it, though...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."