On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Matthew Orgass wrote:

I was going to argue, but since you access by fd then, it's moot.
The initial lookup is still potentially more expensive, but then
you don't hit devices as regularly as files.

#   Right, but this was before special filesystems.  Procfs and kernfs
# already make kernel data available in this way, so expanding the concept
# to allow complete removal of major numbers is not much of a jump.

But wouldn't that break things that depend on dev/ino pairing to identify
hard links?  After all, if you're going to break st_rdev, st_dev is
going to break, too.  A string identifier is going to require changes
to the stat structure, and that's going to break a great many things
which depend on the stat structure being the way it is.

That is, if it's not done correctly...

# Matthew Orgass
# darkstar@pgh.net


				--*greywolf;
--
*BSD:  exercised any daemons lately?