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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."

1 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. 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.