Re: [Sheflug] Where is /dev/eth0 ? What are major & minor devicenumbers?

[Alex Hudson <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2002-05-31 at 18:09, Andrew Basterfield wrote:
> > Yes, I agree they are there for compatability, no, you cannot do without
> > them.
> <snip> You could take major/minor support out of devfs
> and still be able to access the device normally in practically all
> applications.

I would love to see you try that. You _will_ break many, many things.
Device access has bog all to do with it. You will break find, for
example, which will probably jolly up your cron, and many, many other
POSIX utilities. Unless you don't mind having a non-POSIX conformant OS,
of course.. and trying to watch you access your sound system - mixer
settings, dsp, etc. - would be very funny too.

> 
> > Trying to argue procfs is less a filesystem than ext2 is fairly
> > non-sensical.
> 
> Procsfs, devfs, usbfs, devpts et al don't exist on media

That is a silly line to draw. Is a RAM FS a 'virtual' filesystem? Both
ramfs' and procfs (for example) exist in RAM - to draw a distinction on
media type is nonsense. 

> are virtual. They also offer only limited support for normal filesystem
> operations making them IMHO 'less of a filesystem'.

Define 'normal'. The idea is _precisely_ that they support normal
filesystem operations. That's what makes them useful.

> VFS is not a filesystem and it doesn't pretend to be

Er, actually it does - that's the point. It abstracts the implementation
of an FS away from the implementation. It exactly pretends to be a
filesystem. The POSIX filesystem calls - such as open(), stat(), etc. -
are implemented in that layer. 

> Just because a filesystem sits
> behind VFS doesn't make it virtual. The filesystems are real,
> pseudo-filesystems and VFS are virtual.

I would love to know whether or not sqlfs is virtual or real, then,
because your definition appears to make it both. But don't let that
bother you :P 

A filesystem is a filesystem, unless it's a HURD translator of course..

Cheers,

Alex.

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