Re: udev and devfs - The final word

Andries Brouwer
2004-01-05T02:29:09Z

On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 10:37:10PM +0000, viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk wrote:

Hi Al - a happy 2004 to you too!

> Now, care to explain how preserving aforementioned common Unix idiom
> is related to your expostulations?

Hmm. You sound like you agree that random device numbers and NFS
are a bad combination, but don't see why my example might be
relevant.

There is a great variation here in what various servers and clients do,
but roughly speaking filehandles tend to contain a fsid, and this fsid
often (no fsid= given) involves (major,minor,ino). When device numbers
vary randomly, the fsid may vary randomly. Various bad things may happen:
maybe all file handles go stale (or, worse, refer to something else),
or maybe device numbers on the client vary randomly.

Andries