On Sat, 2007-03-10 at 21:31 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Sat, 10 Mar 2007, Nicholas Miell wrote: > > > > Ah, I see. You're just interested in fds as a generic handle concept, > > and not a more Plan 9 type thing. > > Indeed. It's a "handle". > > UNIX has pid's for "process" handles, and "file descriptors" for just > about everything else.
And I imagine that somebody will come up with way of getting a fd for a process sooner or later. > > If that's the goal, somebody should start thinking about reducing the > > contents of struct file to the bare minimum (i.e. not much more than a > > file_operations pointer). > > Well, there's more there, but it really is fairly close. If you look at > it, a "struct file" ends up not having a lot more than the minimal stuff > required to use it as a a handle: it really isn't a very big structure. > > The biggest part is actually the read-ahead state, which is arguably a > generic thing for a file handle, even though not all kinds will be able to > use it. We *could* make that be behind a pointer (along with the "f_pos" > thing, that really logically goes along with the read-ahead thing), of > course, but since most files probably do end up being "traditional file" > structures, it's probably not wrong to just have it in the file. > Actually, I was thinking reducing struct file to the bare minimum, and then using that as the common header shared by object-specific structures. I don't know how unpleasant that would be from a memory allocation perspective, though. -- Nicholas Miell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
