On Oct 17, 2012, at 6:48 AM, dexen deVries wrote: > a technical and organizational problem: back then Linux' /dev consisted of > special files held on drive, its MAJOR/MINOR schema* getting dangerously > cramped. > > those days Linux' /dev is usually mounted at boot and maintained by kernel, > somewhat alike /proc; adding some more entries probably isn't that much of a > problem.
You should explore /sys on Linux. They've embraced namespaces in a major way. $ df /sys Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on sysfs 0K 0K 0K - /sys $ ls -lR /sys |wc 10485 63451 419873 $ ls -l /sys/dev/block/8:1 lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 /sys/dev/block/8:1 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0d.0/host2/target2:0:0/2:0:0:0/block/sda/sda1 Let us see where this leads: $ ls -Ll /sys/dev/block/8:1 total 0K -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 alignment_offset -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 dev -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 discard_alignment drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:26 holders -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 inflight -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 partition drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 power -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:25 size -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 start -r--r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 stat drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 subsystem drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 trace -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4096 Oct 17 11:31 uevent Exploring further... $ ls -l /sys/dev/block/8:1/subsystem lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Oct 17 11:31 /sys/dev/block/8:1/subsystem -> ../../../../../../../../../class/block Editorial comments left as an exercise to the reader!
