On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 06:14:25PM -0400, Sergey Babkin wrote: >BTW, I have another related issue too: since at least 4.7 >all the disk device nodes have charcater device entries in /dev.
As of December 1999 - which is before 4.0-RELEASE. This was well advertised and discussed at the time. Your objections are about 4 years too late. >That's very, very wrong. Even though there may be no difference >any more between the charcater and block drivers, the type of >device node still conveys the information about device types >to the applications. One case in point being a viewer application >(if anyone is interested, http://nac.sf.net ) which must handle >the sequential and random-access devices differently: 'block' vs 'character' has nothing to do with random or sequential access and any application that thinks it does is broken. Any application that directly accesses devices must understand all the various quirks - ability to seek, block size(s) supported, side- effects of operations etc. Yes, block devices must be random access, but character devices can be either random or sequential-only depending on the physical device. The only purpose for block devices was to provide a cache for disk devices. It makes far more sense for this caching to be tightly coupled into the filesystem code where the cache characteristics can be better controlled. Peter _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
