Re: Devices.

[Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost>]

	hello David.  What I don't see in your proposal is a way of implementing a dynamic device
filesystem.  NetBSD, and possibly OpenBSD, are the last Unix-like OS's that I'm aware of that
use static special files in their filesystems to point to devices.  If your proposal was
extended with the idea that we have a device filesystem, then wouldn't we only need one
implementation of a filesystem that knows anything about devices?  When you want a device tree
in a chroot, you just mount the device filesystem on that chroot.  That filesystem would need a
utility that converts a configuration file or database into static permissions and ownership,
but that could be done on a per-instance basis, i.e. have a configuration that describes /dev
at the root of the system, and other /dev's that describe chrooted dev environments, or  dev's
in application directories.  The only case that doesn't cover, that I'm aware of, is what to do
about sockets and fifos, which are commonly scattered all over filesystem trees.
	In any case, with the advent of gpt named partitions, zfs volumes, USB pluggable devices
and other dynamic device environments, not having a dynamic device filesystem is becoming a
real detriment.  The way we handle ZFS is just goofy and fraught with bugs in dynamic
situations.I'd like to see a more integrated approach to this problem.

-thanks
-Brian