I took a look at a couple of the patches that are floating around
to make raw devices work with devfs, and I found them all a bit
unsatisfying. The problem is that they pre-generate a fixed
number of raw device files in devfs which don't actually do anything
until they are bound. It seems to me that it would be much more
devfs-ish to just create the control device initially and then
generate raw device files as needed. This is possible, but would
require some minor changes to the 'raw' utility.
Here's how I think it should work... initially we just have...
/dev/raw/ctl
To bind a raw device for i.e. /dev/scsi/.../part2 you just do...
$ raw /dev/scsi/.../part2
/dev/raw/1
..the raw utility prints the name of the raw device it has bound,
which now appears in devfs. In addition devfs now has symlinks...
/dev/scsi/.../rpart2 -> /dev/raw/1
/dev/discs/disc0/rpart2 -> /dev/raw/1
..etc. Comments?
:j
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