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HEADSUP: Change of Makedev() Semantics on FreeBSD

Posted by Hemos on from the semphores-away dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Poul-Henning Kamp is in the process of adding ref-counting and locking to dev_t, and would very much prefer if this step is completed soon before 5-STABLE gets branched. He says that all this will be transparent to the majority of device drivers, as the refcounting will happen in the make_dev() and destroy_dev() family of calls and normal drivers need not know more about it."

5 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Umm... why post this here? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Seriously, that's what *-devel mailing lists are for. I doubt that the average (and even the not-so-average) Slashdot reader cares.

    (And, this is certainly not the place that FreeBSD device driver writers come to discuss changes to the kernel.)

  2. Anything to comment about? by DrSkwid · · Score: 2

    Anyone know why this is a good/bad thing ?

    The stuff concerning dev_t on the LKML concerned itself with tty stuff.

    Will it really mean the death of tty ? I do hope so.

    isatty is a stupid anachronism (which is why plan9 got rid of such idiocy).

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    1. Re:Anything to comment about? by __past__ · · Score: 2, Informative
      Anyone know why this is a good/bad thing?
      It's a completly uninteresting thing that will not affect any users, and only a few device driver developers.
      The stuff concerning dev_t on the LKML concerned itself with tty stuff.
      What does the LKML have to do with anything?
      --
      Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  3. Do the math by MarkusQ · · Score: 4, Funny

    • World population: ~10^9
    • Proportion that speak english: ~1/10
    • Proportion that speak some form of technical english: ~1/10
    • Proportion of those who speak computer english: ~1/10
    • Proportion of those who program: ~1/10
    • Proportion of those who could write a device driver: ~1/10
    • Proportion of those who actual do write device drivers: ~1/10
    • Proportion of those who are doing so for *nix: ~1/3
    • Proportion of those who are doing so for FreeBSD: ~1/10
    • Proportion of those who use mkdev: ~1/2
    So even assuming 5% of them read /. to keep up an library changes, less than one person will care. Presumably, that was the poster.

    -- MarkusQ

    P.S. So what, you may ask, am I doing here? Easy. Some people are croud followers, and rush to the scene of a big fire or train wreck (or, if none are handy, a mall).

    I'm not like that.

  4. Does this need a Slashdot article ? by chrysalis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I really don't understand why every time a single line of code is changed to this beta version of FreeBSD, a Slashdot article is made.

    Moreover something like that one... Except some rare developpers, nobody knows what it actually changes. Just because in fact... nothing changes... only internals. So what's the point?

    And the 3.4 OpenBSD song has been released :

    http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html

    Why is there no Slashdot article about this?

    --
    {{.sig}}