Re: [PATCH] 2.5.14 IDE 56

Richard Gooch
2002-05-07T18:40:12Z

Linus Torvalds writes:
>
>
> On Tue, 7 May 2002, Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > > > Fugly. What's wrong with readlink(2) as this "magic syscall"?
> > > Ehh - like the fact that it doesn't work on device files?
> >
> > I can't find anything in Posix/SuS that says it isnt allowed to however 8)
>
> We can certainly do it, it just doesn't buy us much of anything, since
> none of the standard tools (ie "ls") will actually do the readlink() for
> anything but a symlink.
>
> So at that point it's just another magic syscall, except we've overloaded
> an old one.
>
> Which may certainly be acceptable, of course.

I wasn't suggesting a magic readlink(2). I was suggesting a *real*
one. Device nodes get stored in the physical tree (what you call
driverfs), and the entries in the logical tree are symlinks. Such as:

/dev/scsi/host0 symlink to /dev/bus/pci0/slot1/function2

or something like that. Easy to implement, easy to understand, easy to
manage.

Regards,

Richard....
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