[TUHS] Device special files

Bakul Shah bakul at bitblocks.com
Thu Feb 8 09:06:24 AEST 2018


On Wed, 07 Feb 2018 17:05:05 -0500 Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> One of the lines I have had about UNIX development is the number if
> namespaces its has.  If you try to develop something like Single System
> Image Clusters (check out OpenSSI.org) you'll hit all of the namespaces.
> 
> Let me see how many I can remember quickly..
> 
>    1. file system
>    2. per device inumbers for storage
>    3. device major numbers
>    4. per device minor numbers
>    5. pid
>    6. gid
>    7. sockets
>    8. port numbers within sockets per protocol
>    9. system V semaphores
>    10. system V shared memory

Most all of these are intrinsic or unavoidable. You can use
strings instead of table indices but still the same.  And some
of these have sub-namespaces.  This is why plan9's mountable
namespaces is such a neat solution. Too bad Unix just stole
/proc & /dev/fd.... And this can be added 

devfs is too big a sledgehammer (+ it needs /etc/devfs.conf
for permissions and ownership using its own DSL). For example,
names of devices not accessible in a jail still show up there.



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