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Re: Symlinks under /proc


On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 03:48:32PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:30:25PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >>On Jan 31 21:23, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >>> On Jan 31 15:11, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >>>>On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:04:57PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote: Have
> >>>>we reached the point yet where we can just get rid of special /dev
> >>>>handling entirely?  Maybe we could just add /dev population to
> >>>>setup.exe or even have cygwin1.dll itself run a program if it detects
> >>>>an unpopulated /dev, sort of like how udev is handled in linux now.
> >>>>
> >>>>My only reservation with doing things this way is that we'd be making
> >>>>cygwin perform a disk lookup every time someone wanted to get to open
> >>>>/dev/tty.
> >>>
> >>>I would not like to change that yet.  So far, the DLL is still
> >>>basically self-sufficient.  If you require on-disk devices, you can't
> >>>use the DLL anymore without having a minimal installation process.  I
> >>>can see the point where I'm getting convinced that exactly that is a
> >>>good idea, but right now...
> >>
> >>Actually, couldn't we just keep /dev/console, /dev/tty* and /dev/null
> >>handled internally?  Everything else seems rather non-critical.
> >
> >You don't even have to do that.  AFAICT, there is no reason for the DLL
> >to have to parse "/dev/tty*" or "/dev/null" when it could just be
> >relying on using major and minor device numbers.
> >
> >I just quickly hacked cygwin to stop parsing /dev entirely and it seems
> >to work ok, for the most part.  The one puzzler is that while it deals
> >ok with /dev/tty, it does not handle /dev/null correctly, even after a
> >/dev/null has been created.
>
> With the latest checkins, it seems to be possible to remove the /dev
> parsing entirely and rely on an on-disk populated /dev.
>
> Igor, could you repost your script for populating /dev?
>
> I don't remember how intelligent it was but I suspect that it doesn't
> actually query the system to figure out what devices are available,
> right?

No, it doesn't -- it just has a hard-coded list.  *Is* there a way to
query the devices available?  It might be easier to do in mknod anyway --
have it return false if the device is not available (when a flag is
supplied, since this isn't default behavior, IIUC).  Then I can have my
script loop until mknod returns false.

It would be good to test it first, though -- does the CVS HEAD still treat
/dev as a virtual directory?
	Igor
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